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This Rare Tyrannosaurus Skeleton Is About To Be Auctioned

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t rex

A nearly complete skeleton of a towering Tyrannosaurus bataaris set to go on auction on Sunday (May 20). The skeleton measures some 8-feet (2.4-meters) tall and 24-feet (7.3-meters) long.

This is the first full Tyrannosaurus specimen to go on auction since "Sue," a Tyrannosaurus rex, sold for $8.3 million in 1997, said David Herskowitz, director of Natural History at Heritage Auctions, the auction house conducting the sale.  

The Tyrannosaurus bataar was uncovered in the Gobi Desert roughly eight years ago and has an estimated value of $950,000. Also called Tarbosaurus bataar, this species is an Asian relative to the North American T. rex.

While the specimen's skull is 80 percent complete, the body is about 75 percent complete, Herskowitz said, adding that it is "an impeccably preserved specimen of the sort that is almost never seen on the open market." The auction is scheduled to include other fossils and minerals, including a T. bataar tooth, an akylosaur skull from the dinosaur Saichania chulsanensis, and askeleton from a troodontid — a group of dinosaurs whose anatomy suggests they were closely related to birds.

The auction takes place at Center 548 (548 W. 22nd Street in New York City), and the specimens will be on public display before the auction, from May 17–19.

"To find any dinosaur already mounted and ready for sale is extremely rare and quite uncommon because of the amount of time, energy and money it takes to prepare a mounted specimen," Herskowitz told LiveScience. "To find a complete dinosaur of any kind on the market is really quite rare, but the rarest of them all are the theropods."

Theropods are a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that included Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus and others bipedal meat-eaters. As top predators, they were less abundant than other species, he said.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and onFacebook.


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Modern Birds Are Essentially Living Baby Dinosaurs

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Modern birds are essentially living dinosaurs with skulls that are remarkably similar to those of baby dinosaurs, according to a new Harvard study.

The study — titled "Birds have paedomorphic dinosaur skulls" and published online in the journal Nature — found evidence that the origins and evolution of modern birds are the result of a drastic change in dinosaur development known as "progenesis" that caused birds to reach sexual maturity sooner.

Species of birds take as little as 12 weeks to reach sexual maturity, thereby retaining the physical characteristics of baby dinosaurs into adulthood.

"By changing the developmental biology in early species, nature has produced the modern bird – an entirely new creature – and one that, with approximately 10,000 species, is today the most successful group of land vertebrates on the planet," Harvard associate professor and lead researcher Arkhat Abzhanov said in a press release.

The researchers noted that it has been traditionally difficult to explain the evolution of certain characteristics of birds (such as feathers, flight and wishbones), but the realization that skulls of modern birds and those of young dinosaurs are similar inspired the study.

Consequently researchers analyzed fossil evidence from skeletons, eggs and soft tissue of bird-like dinosaurs and primitive birds from up to 250 million years ago while tracking how the skull changed shape over millions of years.

They found that modern birds "are living theropod dinosaurs, a group of carnivorous animals that include Velociraptor," according to co-author Mark Norell.

The authors hailed the study as a terrific achievement in the understanding of the mechanisms that drive evolutionary biology.

"That you can have such dramatic success simply by changing the relative timing of events in a creature's development is remarkable," Abzhanov said. "We now understand the relationship between birds and dinosaurs that much better, and we can say that, when we look at birds, we are actually looking at juvenile dinosaurs."

SEE ALSO: A Car-Sized Turtle Was Found In A Colombia Coal Mine >

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Bacteria Found Under The Ocean Floor Hasn't Had Fresh Food Since The Age Of The Dinosaurs

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Pacific ocean

One-hundred feet below the Pacific Ocean sea floor, scientists have discovered bacteria that hasn't been exposed to oxygen, sunlight or new nutrients since the age of the dinosaurs.

Although researchers can't be exactly sure how old the bacteria are — or how they reproduce —  microbiologists at Aarhus University in Denmark posit that the ancient organisms could be anywhere from several thousand to millions of year old, The Washington Post's Joel Achenback reports.

The bacteria, found living in sediments that formed 86 million years ago, have extremely slow metabolisms and are able to survive by living on very small amounts of energy.  

"The slow rate of reproduction means that they cannot evolve at the same speed as bacteria in friendlier, energy-rich, nutrient-thick settings. That means, in turn, that they may preserve more primitive genetic features than other bacteria," scientist Robert Hazen told Achenback.  

The ability of bacteria to stay alive in such a nutrient-starved environment supports the idea that similar organisms could live on other planets, requiring very little to sustain life.  

SEE ALSO: A New Harvard Study Finds Modern Birds Are Like Living Baby Dinosaurs > 

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You Can Thank A Meteorite For The Red Color Of Tomatoes

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Tomatoes

More than 60 million years ago, a meteorite slammed into Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, and, on a less morbid note, giving tomatoes their distinct red color. 

According new research published in Naturethe crash and resulting solar eclipse created extremely stressful conditions.

As a method of survival, a distant relative of the crop grew three times in size, while producing the fleshy red fruit we enjoy in salads and mozzarella sandwiches today.  

So it all worked out! Well, except for the dinosaurs.  

SEE ALSO: Why Heavy Raindrops Don't Crush Tiny Mosquitoes > 

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Here's Your Chance To See Dinosaur Porn

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Dinosaur sex

Though dinosaurs are hundreds of times the size of birds, their sex lives may not have been that different from their modern-day descendants, scientists with dinosaur sex on the brain suggest.

While it's difficult to really know what happened when dinosaurs got down and dirty, they make some educated guesses based on dinosaur anatomy and the mating habits of birds, the Huffington Post says:

The males and females of modern-day birds and reptiles have a single body opening for urination, defecation, and reproduction--something called a cloaca (Latin for sewer). Paleontologists believe that dinosaurs had the same basic equipment, and that they coupled by pressing their cloacas together.

Some dinosaurs may have had penises or similar organs, but researchers can't be sure since soft tissue (ha ha!) isn't preserved in fossils. If T. Rex had a penis, it could have been up to 12 feet in length. The male would have mounted from behind and to line his cloaca up with the female's.

"I don't think there's much doubt about that," Dr. Gregory M. Erickson, an evolutionary biologist at Florida State University, told The Huffington Post in a telephone interview. But, he acknowledged, "It must have been a hell of a thing to see."

Click through to the Huffington Post for a slideshow of images and videos of dinosaurs getting it on. BuzzFeed also has a nice collection of dinosaur porn. Also, check the video below for Titanosaur sex in explicit detail, from the Discovery Channel's 2010 special "Tyranosaurus Sex."

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Drunken Hooligans Destroy Irreplaceable Dinosaur Fossils

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Destroyed dinosaur fossils

Whether it was malicious intent or drunken tomfoolery doesn't matter much to Phillip Bell, a graduate student at the University of Alberta in Canada. His precious, irreplaceable duck-billed hadrosaur fossil has been destroyed.

Bell and a team from the University of Alberta discovered the find, along with many other dinosaur fossils, near Grande Prairie, Alberta. It was covered over and the team planned to move it mid-July. When they returned to the site, they discovered the fossils, which were bound for the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, had been destroyed.

Bones from the hadrosaur were scattered around the site or missing. As he told CBC News Edmonton:

"This was the find of the season for us. There was a lot of excitement around it. Now it’s just kind of a salvage operation, trying to put back the pieces. But it’s going to be significantly less than what it was going to be," said paleontologist Dr. Phil Bell. “It’s an irreplaceable loss."

It isn't the first loss, either. Empty alcohol bottles and other debris are often found at the site, and three other fossils have been damaged at the site since May. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and officials from the University of Alberta and the Royal Tyrrell Museum are investigating the incident.

Here are some more pictures of the destruction, courtesy of Phil Bell:

Fossils

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A Large Dinosaur Footprint Was Found On NASA's Campus

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Footprint

Around 110 million years ago, a large, spiky dinosaur roamed the same earth as some of the nation's best space scientists.

On Aug. 17, dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford found the back footprint of a nodosaur on NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, The Washington Post's Brian Vastag first reported.  

See more photos from the discovery > 

The nodosaur lived during the the Cretaceous Period, which ran between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago. The leaf-eating beast was characterized by an armored body.

The imprint is about one-foot across and may have been made as the dinosaur was running because it's not fully pressed into the ground.  

Other nodosaur tracks have been found in the Western United States and British Colombia in Canada, but it's rare to find a footprint in Maryland, according to Stanford.  

Johns Hopkins University dinosaur expert David Weishampel confirmed that the footprint is real, according to NASA

The space agency is now in discussions with Maryland officials to devise the best of course of action for documenting and preserving the print. 







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Some Dinosaurs Used The Same Hunting Techniques As Modern House Cats

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A new study suggests that some predatory dinosaurs used ambush hunting techniques similar to modern cats, Jonathan Ball of BBC reports. 

The research, published in PLoS One, studied the fossil remains of two Sinocalliopteryx dinosaurs, eight-foot-long creatures that walked on powerful hind legs, and found the ground dwellers had been feasting on primitive birds and flying dinosaurs when they died.

Dr. Bell said the dinosaurs were wily hunters and that cats are a good comparison because they are "incredibly stealthy, stalking their prey before pouncing."

The Canadian-Chinese team found a Sinornithosaurus, a feathered flying dinosaur measuring about 3 feet 4 inches, inside the stomach of one of the fossils from northeast China and preserved remains of two primitive crow-sized birds in the other.

"I can imagine a Sinocalliopteryx stalking a bird through the underbrush waiting for the right moment to leap into the air and catching a bird mid-flight," researcher Dr. Phil Bell told BBC.

The view has not gained universal approval, however, as Dr. Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol told BBC that the "only way to strongly argue for this hypothesis would be to have more evidence."

Ball notes that fossils provide one of the few tangible links back to the Cretaceous and Jurassic eras—when dinosaurs ruled the earth—as they represent a petrified and rudimentary snapshot of prehistoric life.

"It's so rare to get a glimpse into how dinosaurs – animals that have been extinct for millions of years – behaved," Dr. Bell said. "We now know more about the diet of this species than any other dinosaur." 

SEE ALSO: Modern Birds Are Essentially Living Baby Dinosaurs >

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Should We Strive To Save All Endangered Species?

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bengal tigerAs a list of the world's 100 most critically endangered species was published, one academic challenged the idea that all should be preserved.

The idea that all species have an equal right to exist makes as much sense as believing we should bring back dinosaurs and dodos, a scientist has suggested.

A report on the 100 most critically endangered species in the world has been published by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), with its authors arguing they should all be saved.

But Dr Sarah Chan, deputy director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at Manchester University, challenged the belief that all species should be preserved.

She said: “When we say that all species have an equal right to exist, do we mean just all of the species that currently exist? What about the species that have already gone extinct?

“I don’t see any good reason to limit ourselves only to this precise moment in time in terms of the species that we should be concerned about.

“But that being the case, if we think that all species have an equal right to exist, we have an equal obligation to resurrect extinct species, to bring back the dinosaurs and the dodos.”

The list of threatened species includes the pygmy three-toed sloth, the Jamaican rock iguana and Tarzan’s chameleon.

The report on them, entitled Priceless or Worthless, identifies the threats they all face and how they can be addressed.

Professor Jonathan Baillie, co-author and director of conservation at ZSL, said allowing species to die out would lead to “a situation where we don’t have enough species to provide.”

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “They should be saved in their own right, it’s an ethical issue as well as a question of sustainability.

“But it’s also about the future generation, and we should be doing everything we can to show that we respect all forms of life. How we treat these 100 on the list is really representative of how we’ll treat the rest of life.”

All the species listed in his report face extinction “driven by humans”, he said, adding: “We have the ability to reverse these declines and it’s really our moral imperative to do so.”

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Researcher Apologizes For Not Discovering Cool New Species Of Dinosaur Sooner

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Two-hundred million years ago, a house-cat-size dinosaur that nibbled on plants roamed among Earth's mightiest carnivores.   

The tiny dinosaur, called Pegomastax africanus, was recently identified by Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, from some fossils originally found in South Africa about fifty years ago.  

Although the finding was published in the journal ZooKeys today, The New York Times' John Noble Wilford says that Sereno "apologized in an interview for not getting around sooner to this piece of research."

Regardless, this less than two-foot long creature that was apparently covered in porcupine-like quills and weighed less than a modern house cat is pretty cool.  

The tiny beast also had sharp fangs that were probably used for self-defense since the dinosaurs did not eat meat.  

In the video below paleoartist Tyler Keillor from the University of Chicago creates a model of the little vegetarian.

SEE ALSO: A Giant Rocket Has Been Sitting Underground For 50 Years After NASA Killed The Project >

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See The Five Freakiest Dinosaurs Ever Dug Up

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Freaky dinosaur Linhenykus

When we think about dinosaurs, it's typically hulking beasts like the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex and the noble triceratops that come to mind.

But the era of giant lizards spanned hundreds of millions of years, and for every popular dino that made a cameo in Jurassic Park, there are dozens of little-celebrated, freakishly bizarre creatures with feathers, fingers, and other evolutionary idiosyncrasies.

Here, five of the strangest dinosaurs paleontologists have unearthed.

1. The cross between a porcupine and a parrot

The 2-foot-long Pegomastax africanus, a peculiar little beast that lived 200 million years ago, had pig-like fangs, a parrot-like beak, and was covered in porcupine-like quills that made it look like a "strange little bird." Despite its pointy teeth, recent research suggests it subsisted primarily on plants, baring its fangs primarily for self-defense. If the animal were alive, says study author Paul Sereno, "it would be a nice pet — if you could train it not to nip you."



2. The pot-bellied dinosaur covered in feathers

Therizinosaur isn't a household name, says Brian Switek at Smithsonian Magazine. But they are "some of the strangest dinosaurs ever found." The "long-necked, pot-bellied omnivores" possessed unusually long claws, making them more odd than frightening. "The image is wholly different from the dinosaurs I first met as a kid," says Switek. "Perfect for a creature that has pushed the boundaries of what we think a dinosaur is."



3. The cat-sized cross between a mammal and dinosaur

The 20-inch long Thrinaxodon wandered the Woodlands of Africa 250 million years ago, sporting a "cat-like profile" and, quite possibly, fur. It belonged to a group of early Triassic creatures that experts say bridged the gap between dinosaurs and mammals, and could itself have been an ancient ancestor of modern-day mammals.



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These Vegetarian Dinosaurs Could Probably Out-Chew An Elephant

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Dinosaur teeth

Giant plant-eating dinosaurs may have been champion chewers up there with the likes of mammals such as horses, bison or elephants, researchers say.

The finding could help explain why these behemoths dominated the plains of Europe, Asia and North America during the last part of the age of dinosaurs, scientists added.

Duck-billed herbivores called hadrosaurids thundered across the world during the Late Cretaceous period, dating about 65 million to 100 million years ago. They grazed on horsetails, ferns and primitive flowering plants on the ground, and browsed on Earth's conifers.

The plants these dinosaurs fed on were tough and covered with hard, tooth-gouging particles. Hadrosaurids chewed their meals with teeth that possessed flattened grinding surfaces much like those of horses and bison. Some hadrosaurids sported up to 1,400 of these teeth, and were continually replacing them.

"They were like walking pulp mills — I suspect they could eat any kind of plant they ran into," said researcher Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

The chewing teeth of mammals can be relatively complex, possessing four major types of tissue of varying hardness. These combinations help keep the grinding ridges and valleys on a tooth's surface from wearing and breaking down. In contrast, most reptile teeth are comparably simple, with only two kinds of tissue — hard enamel and a softer bone-like material. [Paleo-Art: Stunning Dinosaur Illustrations]

"It didn't make sense to me that the complex surfaces we see in hadrosaur teeth could be done with the simple tooth tissues reptiles are supposed to have," Erickson said.

Now researchers find hadrosaurid teeth were far more complex than those of known reptiles — they were composed of six different types of tissue.

"They were as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated, than any known mammal," Erickson told LiveScience.

After analyzing fossil hadrosaurid teeth with microscopy and X-rays and by testing them with diamond-tipped probes, the researchers found the way tissues were distributed varied substantially within each tooth. This would allow a single tooth to assume different forms and functions as the tooth changed over time, exposing different surfaces as the teeth migrated across the chewing surfaces in the mouths of the dinosaurs over time.

The complexity of hadrosaurid teeth would have proved excellent tools for handling tough, gritty plants. This could explain why this group of dinosaurs was so common.

Now Erickson and his colleagues plan to use these methods to investigate teeth from both extinct and living reptile and mammal species to see how these groups diversified in response to their diet.

"We still don't have a good understanding even of how horse teeth work," Erickson said.

The scientists detail their findings in tomorrow's (Oct. 5) issue of the journal Science.

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New DNA Study Crushes The Hope Of A Real Life Jurassic Park

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jurassic park

In August, Clive Palmer, an insanely rich and slightly crazy Australian mining magnate, announced he wanted to build a real life Jurassic Park. Sadly, news out today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B indicates he will never get his wish.

By studying ancient fossilized bones, researchers, led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Australia, found that the genetic material needed to clone a dinosaur, known as DNA, has a half-life of 521 years. That means that in any given bone or fossil half of the atomic bonds that hold molecules of DNA together are broken in 521 years. Then, after another 521 years, another half degrades.

The number they got — 521 years — is actually about 400 times longer than researchers in the lab had suspected.

They found this out by analyzing the DNA from 158 radiocarbon dated fossils of the New Zealand moa, a large flightless bird, the oldest of which was 8,000 years old. They discovered that they couldn't get enough DNA data from fossils older than 1.5 million years, because the strands would be too short to give good information, though different preservation conditions could change that number.

Interestingly, the oldest DNA ever found was in 800,000-year-old ice.

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The Velociraptor Was Actually Nothing Like Its Hollywood Depiction

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velociraptor dinosaur skeleton

Velociraptor—"raptor" for short—roamed the Earth about 75 million to 71 million years ago toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, which was the glory days of the dinosaurs.

Velociraptor was named in 1924 by Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History.

He bestowed the name on this dinosaur, which is derived from the Latin words "velox" (swift) and "raptor" (robber or plunderer), as an apt description of its survival tactics.

Earlier that year, Osborn had called the dinosaur "Ovoraptor djadochtari" in an article in the popular press, but was later referred to as Velociraptor in scientific journals and papers.

There were two species of Velociraptors. Fossils of the V. mongoliensis species have been discovered in Mongolia. A second species, V. osmolskae, was named in 2008 for skull material discovered in Inner Mongolia, China.

A member of the dromaeosaurid family, Velociraptor was roughly the size of a small turkey and smaller than others in this family of dinosaurs, which included the Deinonychus and Achillobator. Adult Velociraptors were up to 6.8 feet (2 meters) long, 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) tall at the hip and weighed up to 33 pounds (15 kilograms).

Like Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor had a prominent role in the "Jurassic Park" movies, but scientists do not believe it resembled anything close to its Hollywood depiction in terms of size or appearance. While the Velociraptor was featherless in the movies, paleontologists discovered quill knobs on a well-preserved forearm from Mongolia in 2007, indicating Velociraptor had feathers. The feathers were just for show—most likely to attract a mate, regulate body temperature and help females protect their eggs—as Velociraptor did not fly.

Although many of its closely related ancestors could fly, Velociraptor is thought to have been grounded due to its weight in proportion to its short forelimbs. Scientists theorize that the short forelimbs could have been the evolutionary leftovers of what were once wings.

Although it shared many of the same physical characteristics with other dromaeosaurs, Velociraptor's distinguishing features included a long skull that was concave on the upper surface and convex on the lower. It also had a distinctive upturned snout.

Its 26 to 28 teeth were widely spaced and serrated, especially toward the back, making them ideal for catching and securing quick-moving prey.

Velociraptor's tail of hard, fused bones was inflexible and not useful as a weapon but it kept him balanced as he ran, hunted and jumped. Scientists estimate that a Velociraptor could jump as high as 10 feet (3 meters) straight in the air.

Velociraptor, like other dromaeosaurids, had two large hand-like appendages with three curved claws. The claws were used the same way as birds of prey use talons—as hooks to keep victims from escaping.

The jaws were lined with 26 to 28 widely spaced teeth on each side, each more strongly serrated on the back edge than the front. A sickle-shaped retractable claw on each hindfoot was likely used to finish the job of killing its prey by piercing its throat.

The moniker of "speedy thief" is a bit misleading. The Velociraptor may have been able to run up to roughly 40 mph (60 kph) on its two skinny legs, but it could only sustain that speed for very short bursts.

What did Velociraptor eat?

A carnivore, it is believed that the Velociraptor survived on mostly small mammals such as reptiles, amphibians, and other smaller, slower dinosaurs.

The horned dinosaur Protoceratops, a herbivore, was a favorite meal of the Velociraptor, according to paleontologists. It also preyed on other herbivore dinosaurs.

Fossil discoveries

The first Velociraptor fossil was discovered by Peter Kaisen on the first American Museum of Natural History expedition to the Outer Mongolian Gobi Desert in August 1923. The skull was crushed but complete and one of the toe claws was also recovered.

Velociraptor fossils have been found in the Gobi Desert, which covers southern Mongolia and parts of northern China. In all, about a dozen Velociraptor fossils exist and all known specimens of Velociraptor mongoliensis were discovered in the Djadochta Formation (also spelled Djadokhta), in the Mongolian province of Ömnögovi. [Image Gallery: Dinosaur Fossils]

While North American teams were not permitted in communist Mongolia during the Cold War, Soviet and Polish scientists collaborated with Mongolian scientists on expeditions that recovered several more Velociraptor specimens. On one of these expeditions in 1971, a Polish-Mongolian team discovered the fossils of a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops in the midst of battle. They were preserved by a sand dune that collapsed on them.

Between 1988 and 1990, a joint Chinese-Canadian team discovered Velociraptor remains in northern China. In 1990, a joint Mongolian-American expedition to the Gobi, led by the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, turned up several well-preserved skeletons.

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Why Dinosaurs Had Wings

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Birds paleontology wings dinosaur fossil

The first feathers and wings in nature evolved for decoration rather than flying, according to a new study.

Today's birds inherit their wings and feathers from their dinosaur ancestors, which are thought to be the first animals to have grown them millions of years ago.

Now a study of new fossils discovered in Canada suggests that feathers and wing-like structures may have originally developed for the purpose of attracting mates and not flying or keeping warm.

Experts from Calgary University examined the fossils of one young dinosaur and two adults from the feathered species Ornithomimus edmontonicus, found in 75-million-year-old rock formations.

Marks on the remains showed that each of the animals was covered in small, downy feathers but one of the adults also had longer feathers with stiff central shafts protruding from its forelimbs.

The fact that the ostrich-like dinosaurs did not develop feathers until adulthood suggests that they were only used once they were sexually mature, perhaps for courtship rituals, to attract partners or for brooding.

The wing-like forelimbs and feathers most likely developed further for other purposes such as flying or keeping warm at a later stage of evolution, researchers wrote in the Science journal.

Dr Darla Zelenitsky, who led the study, said: "This dinosaur was covered in down-like feathers throughout life, but only older individuals developed larger feathers on the arms, forming wing-like structures.

"This pattern differs from that seen in birds, where the wings generally develop very young, soon after hatching."

Co-author François Therrien, of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, added: "The fact that wing-like forelimbs developed in more mature individuals suggests they were used only later in life, perhaps associated with reproductive behaviors like display or egg brooding."

The fossils marked the first discovery of ornithomimid specimens preserved with feathers, and suggest that all dinosaurs of the same family, would have been covered in feathers like many other types of dinosaur.

They were also the first of their kind to be found in the Western Hemisphere, with most other feathered dinosaur skeletons limited to sites in China and Germany.

While previous evidence of feathers had only been found in fine-grained rock, the new fossils were unearther in sandstone, suggesting that many more may be found in rocks deposited by ancient rivers across the world.

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Why Two-Winged Creatures Outlasted Four-Winged Creatures

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microraptor

Why Microraptor became extinct

IT IS tempting to think of the process of evolution as one of continuous, stately progress towards better-designed organisms. In fact, it is full of blind alleys--as a fossil called Microraptor shows.

At some point during the Jurassic period, a group of dinosaurs evolved feathers. These may have been for warmth, for display or for both. They were certainly not, at the beginning, for flight. But in one line of these dinosaurs evolution modified them for precisely that purpose. This modification led, via Archaeopteryx, a species that lived 150m years ago, to birds.

Feathered dinosaurs did not go away just because they had spun off the birds, though. They persisted right up until the end of the Cretaceous period, 65m years ago, when all (non-avian) dinosaurs met their ends. And well before that, in a part of the Cretaceous called the Aptian, 120m years ago, the whole thing happened again, in the form of Microraptor. Except that this time, the flying animal in question had four wings, rather than two.

Microraptor's existence raises two questions: exactly how did it deploy its four wings, and why does it have no living descendants? The answers, according to Michael Habib and Justin Hall of the University of Southern California, are linked.

Until recently, there were two schools of thought about how Microraptor carried its wings when in flight. One school proposed that it looked like a biplane, holding one set of wings above the other when it flew. The second school suggested that all four wings were coplanar. Dr Habib and Mr Hall, however, think both are wrong. They see a division of labour between the two sets of wings. The front pair, they agree, provided lift. But they believe that the back pair were for steering.

Microraptor's hindwings were radically different in shape from its forewings. Rather than being lithe and graceful, they were short and stubby. But they would have made good rudders, as Dr Habib and Mr Hall have demonstrated using a computer model of them. This suggests they would have allowed the animal to reduce the radius of its turning circle by 40% and almost triple the speed of a turn.

That makes sense. The rocks Microraptor fossils are found in are also full of trees. Clearly, it was a forest animal. Predatory birds that dwell in modern forests, such as the sharp-shinned hawk, are masters of making tight, quick turns around trunks and over branches as they pursue their prey. That Microraptor was a predator is known because one specimen has a bird in its belly. It would surely have benefited from a similar capability.

Why, then, was such an aerial paragon not ancestral to any modern creature? One possibility is bad luck. The mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous was caused by a collision between Earth and an asteroid or comet. Though some groups of animals did better than others, survival was often at random. However, the fossil record does not prove that any Microraptor-like animal actually made it to the end of the Cretaceous. They probably become extinct well before that.

Dr Habib proposes that what actually did for Microraptor was what he calls a drag tax. His model suggests the manoeuvrability that its hind wings granted the animal came at the expense of increased drag. Modern birds do not pay the drag tax because their manoeuvrability results from a single pair of wings that are better able to cope with stress than Microraptor's forewings were. That stress-resistance is provided by muscles which are attached to a keel-like extension of the sternum. Microraptor lacked this keel.

According to Dr Habib, birds adapted for forest flight are able to make the same turns that Microraptor made, but without losing nearly as much energy to drag. This, he argues, made bird flight more efficient--and that would have made it impossible for Microraptor to compete.

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New Dinosaur With Massive Eye Socket Discovered

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Sauroniops dinosaur LOTR

Some 95 million years ago, a two-legged dinosaur even larger than the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex skulked the deltas of North Africa looking for its next meal.

The newly categorized and christened Sauroniops pachytholus — or "Eye of Sauron" in Greek— gets its name from the omniscient demon who stared knowingly over Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films.

So how exactly did Sauroniops earn its name? The only fossil unearthed of the flesh-eater so far is a tiny upper-skull fragment that's part of the dino's massive eye socket.

"The idea of a predator that is physically known only as its fierce eye reminded me of Sauron, in particular as depicted in Peter Jackson's movies," study leader Andrea Cau, a researcher at Italy's Museum Geologico Giovanni Capellini, tells National Geographic.

"The skull bone of Sauroniops is very broad and particularly thick: This suggests an animal as big as Tyrannosaurus," says Cau — perhaps as large as 40 feet in length.  

But that isn't all Cau and her team have been able to glean from the small skull fragment. It's clear that Sauroniops also possessed a prominent bump on its head.

In other examples of theropods, "bumps, knobs, and horns are common forms of ornamentation,"says Brian Switek at Smithsonian Magazine. Cau thinks the dome might have been used in "head-butting [mating] behavior."

It's also likely Sauroniops had a lot of competition at the top of the food chain, despite having "dozens of bladelike teeth,"notes Cau. The domed carnivore probably competed with three other giant, bipedal meat-eaters that inhabited the same region. "Sauroniops lived along the banks of a large delta, under a hot and warm climate, very rich of fishes and crocodiles,"said Cau. "The abundance of food may explain the abundance of predatory dinosaurs."

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Actually, The Age Of Earth Is Relevant To The Economy

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T-rex

WE ARE now about 1,400 days out from the next presidential election, so it's time for the potential candidates to start jockeying for position. Hence Marco Rubio's fabulously elusive (now viral) answer to the rather simple, if seemingly insignificant question about the age of the Earth.

I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

As others have pointed out, it's actually not a great mystery. Scientists are agreed that the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Mr Rubio may not be a scientist himself, but the science is readily accessible, much like the economics he uses to opine on the economy, despite not being an economist (only the science is a bit more reliable). He sits on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; surely one of his aides can demystify the situation with a simple Google search.

I can find the age of the earth by accessing Google on my iPhone via the cellular network provided by Verizon. I can do this because smart people used science to create these things. I can access Mr Rubio's inane answer via the internet on my tablet because many science-believing innovators are interested in making money. When they create things, using science, they increase America's output and contribute to the country's economic growth.

So while the age of the Earth is not directly relevant to America's economy, it's useful as an indicator of the country's belief in and study of science, which is germane to any discussion of GDP and growth rates. It also says something about our economic policymakers. As Paul Krugmanpoints out, "the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence—and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet!—if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy."

More broadly, there are those who would like to call a truce between science and religion, and based on his attempt to dodge the question, perhaps Mr Rubio is one of them. But the senator's comments are the reason why there can be no truce. If the status quo allows a leader like Mr Rubio to benefit from claiming that accepted science is in fact mystery, then science is losing. When divine explanations and scientific truths are given equal footing, no armistice can be accepted. Rather, science must continue to forcefully rebut religion's unsubstantiated claims in public battles like this. And smart politicians must be made to feel profound discomfort when dealing in the absurdities that appeal to some faithful voters.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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Dinosaurs Slim Down In New Study

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Brachiosaurus new skin bones model

The fact that bones have curves has now thrown a curveball into calculations of dinosaur weight, researchers say.

New estimates suggest dinosaurs may have been lighter than once thought, scientists explain.

With the rare exceptions of fossilized scraps of skin, feathers, bristles and other relatively soft tissues, all that remains of most extinct creatures are their skeletons. One way that investigators seek to learn more about these lost animals is to deduce their weight from their bones.

Traditionally, researchers would calculate estimates of dinosaur mass using a leg measurement such as the circumference of leg bones, understanding the relationship between body mass and this circumference in modern animals, "and scaling this up to the size of a dinosaur," said researcher Charlotte Brassey, a biomechanist at the University of Manchester in England.

For the sake of simplicity, these calculations often model leg bones as columnar beams. However, "as soon as we introduce irregularities into their shape — the lumps, bumps and curves that are typical of animal bones — then they no longer behave like columns," Brassey told LiveScience. [Gallery: Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs]

Dinosaur crash tests

To overcome any errors that simplifying these curved organic structures might introduce, the scientists developed complex 3-D models of leg bones from eight modern animal species — the giraffe; the white-tailed eagle; the American flamingo; the European hedgehog; the common murre, a large bird; the rock hyrax, a guinea piglike animal; the Senegal bush baby, a type of monkey; and the European polecat, a weasel-like animal.

dinosaur bones stressWhen the researchers digitally crash-tested the bones by virtually loading stress on the ends of the bones, they found "the smallest change in the position or direction of loading induced significant amounts of bending," Brassey said.

By simplifying leg bones down to basic columns, previous studies could have underestimated the stresses experienced in animal limbs by up to 142 percent.

"We've always known that reducing bones down to simple beams was a huge simplification," Brassey said, but it was only after she created the models and compressed them "that I realized how infeasible it was."

True dinosaur mass

This raises concerns that past equations regarding fossil species, including dinosaurs, could have overestimated the maximum body weight their legs were capable of supporting.

"Unfortunately, it's not as simple as saying, 'These equations underestimate stress by 20 percent.' Instead, it depends on the underlying shape of the bone," Brassey said. "A whole-body approach to mass prediction in dinosaurs might be preferable."

When the researchers carried out such a whole-body approach to mass prediction with Giraffatitan, the giant dinosaur previously called Brachiosaurus, they came up with a body mass of 25 tons (23 metric tons), "which is quite a bit lower than some previous predictions," Brassey said. Previous mass estimates for Giraffatitan ranged from 31 to 86 tons (28 to 78 metric tons.)

"Other scientists will argue that finite element analysis remains too computationally expensive and time-consuming," Brassey said. "We appreciate this, and have also introduced improvements to the beam equations in our study for those who do not wish to use finite element analysis." (Finite element analysis is a method of breaking down a problem into many small elements that can be solved in relation to one another using complex equations.)

The findings another intriguing question: Why are bones curved in the first place?

"We've found that it massively increases stress levels when loading the bones in compression, which would be disadvantageous, yet most bones still have some degree of curvature, so evolution hasn't acted to get rid of this curvature," Brassey said.

There have been plenty of suggestions as to why the curvature is there — for instance, to pack muscles around the bones. "But we still haven't really come up with the solution yet," Brassey said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Nov. 21 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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Fossil Discovered In The 1930s Could Be The World's Oldest Dinosaur

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Dinosaur Nyasasaurus Triassic

No one really knows when dinosaurs evolved.

Hoping to clear up this mystery, researchers have been studying the mysterious fossil of Nyasasaurus parringtoni, which predates all other dinosaurs by 10 million to 15 million years.

Their analysis appears today, Dec. 4, in the journal Biology Letters. From what they found, this ancient-of-the-ancients finding could be either the world's oldest dinosaur, or at least the closest relative to the dinosaurs ever discovered.

"If the newly named Nyasasaurus parringtoni is not the earliest dinosaur, then it is the closest relative found so far," study researcher Sterling Nesbitt, of the University of Washington, said in a press release.

"Nyasasaurus and its age have important implications regardless of whether this taxon is a dinosaur or the closest relatives of dinosaurs," Nesbitt said. "It establishes that dinosaurs likely evolved earlier than previously expected and refutes the idea that dinosaur diversity burst onto the scene in the Late Triassic, a burst of diversification unseen in any other groups at that time."

Nyasasaurus is the size of Labrador retriever with a really long tail, and was discovered in the early 1930s in the Ruhuhu Valley of Southern Tanzania, but wasn't described until now. While the oldest known dinosaurs date back to the Triassic period about 230 million years ago, Nyasasaurus dates back to 243 million years ago, based on the stratified Earth in which it was found.

Before the analysis of the Nyasasaurus fossils, the closest relatives to the early dinosaurs were considered to be the silesaurids, a sister-lineage of animals that evolved around the same time as the dinosaurs, but took another evolutionary path. The two lineages have a common ancestor sometime in the early Middle Triassic.

Based on an analysis and comparison of the Nyasasaurus bones with those of early dinosaurs and silesaurids, the researchers were able to say that Nyasasaurus is either oldest example of the dinosaur lineage, or the closest relative to dinosaurs in the sister-linage of the silesaurids ever found.

The findings suggest that dinosaurs evolved at the latest during the middle Triassic Period, and supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs came from the southern portion of Pangaea, which is now South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia, and India.

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