Last week, researchers from Brazil published an article in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences updating the world on the state of dinosaur trace fossils in Brazil. But they're not just any trace fossils; these are the fossilized remains of the remains of a dinosaur's dinner: feces and urine.

Fossilized feces are called coprolites and are not uncommon. You can buy coprolite jewelry on Etsy and a (potentially mis-identified) six-million-year-old coprolite sold at auction for $10,370 earlier this year.

Unlike feces, liquid urine doesn't get preserved for millions of years. But the impression of a high-powered stream of dinosaur pee hitting soft sand can be preserved. Those impressions are called urolites, and they look like this:

Imagine you briefly turn on a hose and fire it at soft soil or sand. You'll probably create a deeper hole where the water initially hits, and then a shallower, narrower, area as the liquid flows away. That's the shape that these urolites have. When the researchers originally published a study on the Brazilian urolites back in 2004, they looked to a modern animal to explain their distinctive shape. It turns out that ostriches pee (video, if you are so inclined) in a similar way, letting out a stream of liquid waste that hits the ground at a fairly high speed, followed by their solid waste, separately.

It's a fascinating idea, but scientists are still trying to figure out if that's actually how dinosaurs pee.

"The question," Brian Switek wrote on his Laelaps blog earlier this year "is whether non-avian dinosaurs expelled their solid and semi-solid waste together, like many birds, or they urinated and defecated separately as ostriches and crocodylians can."

Figuring out how dinosaurs excreted their excrement still requires more research — and more fossils. But those aren't easy to come by. The urolites in Brazil are among the few dinosaur-associated urolites in the world. The scientists in Brazil are concerned about the preservation of the coprolites and urolites, writing in their conclusions that their work collecting specimens is being hampered by mining and ranching operations near the location of the fossils, which they refer to as a "natural treasure."

I think we can all agree that it's a fairly impressive description for something that started out as... well... crap.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

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The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs set off an intense heat wave that briefly boiled the Earth's atmosphere – but it didn't burn off all the plants.

Humanity has not been unlucky enough to observe at first hand the effects of a large impact, so to investigate whether a massive asteroid would spark off a global wildfire we had to turn to the laboratory.

We have modelled, for the first time, the heat generated by the impact and what it meant for the planet's plants. Our research is published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

This all happened 65m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Suddenly, between 60 and 80% of all living species became extinct.

Until the 1980s, this catastrophic loss of life was a mystery, but then scientists found a clue – traces of the element iridium in rocks of this age.

Iridium generally falls to Earth with extraterrestrial objects. This suggested a massive asteroid collided with the planet and that this could be responsible for the mass extinction.

Ten years later, scientists found the 65m year-old, 180km wide, Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which finally provided the smoking gun that could explain the apparent chaos at the end of the Cretaceous era. A crater that wide suggests that an asteroid or comet approximately 10km wide hit the Earth.

The impact would have released a huge amount of energy – equivalent to more than a billion Hiroshima bombs. The asteroid itself was vaporised as it smashed into the Earth and in doing so vaporised and blasted out particles of the rock that it hit.

A huge glowing ball of hot rock and vapour rushed up from the impact site at huge speeds, ejecting it way above the atmosphere up into space. As it hit the cold of space it decelerated, cooled and rained back through the atmosphere, re-solidifying and forming tiny droplets of rock known as "spherules".

As these spherules fell through the atmosphere they were subject to the same frictional-drag which causes space shuttles to become super-heated as they return to earth.

This in turn meant as the particles rained down through the atmosphere they delivered a massive blast of heat to the ground. Scientists call this a "thermal pulse".

This heat pulse has widely been suggested to have ignited global wildfires and has been cited as a cause of the mass extinction.

Recreating the impact

New computer modelling techniques have enabled us to generate better estimates of the heat pulse resulting from this impact.

We found it wasn't evenly distributed across the surface of the Earth.

Areas close to the impact site experienced a strong but very short-lived pulse – reaching a peak heat flux of around 50kW/m² (20 times higher than a human can tolerate) for around one and a half minutes.

Further away, the maximum heat flux was lower – a peak of 20kw/m² but lasted much longer – up to seven and a half minutes.

We teamed up earth scientists with fire safety engineers to investigate whether this heat would lead to a massive global wildfire. The heat pulse from the asteroid impact was recreated using state-of-the-art apparatus usually used to test the flammability of furnishings and materials.

This provided, for the first time, the ability to test whether the heat pulse from the impact could have set fire to the world's plants.

Our research reveals that the short sharp blast of heat felt closer to the impact could not have ignited live plants.

However the longer drawn out pulse further away from the impact may have started fires in some locations, implying that localised fires may have occurred. But critically "global firestorms" were unlikely.

This turns our understanding of the heat pulse on its head as its effects would have been greater further away from the impact. Earth scientists will have to reassess their understanding of the fossil record of life.

Until now they have assumed the heat pulse was strongest closer to the crater, but now patterns of extinction and survival must be reinterpreted by considering a more severe heat pulse further away.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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A new dinosaur which had an extraordinarily long neck has been discovered in China and named the ‘Dragon of Qijiang.’

Qijianglong (pronounced "CHI-jyang-lon") is about 15 metres in length and lived about 160 million years ago in the Late Jurassic.

The fossil site was found by construction workers in 2006, and the digging eventually hit a series of large neck vertebrae stretched out in the ground.

Incredibly, the head of the dinosaur was still attached.

"It is rare to find a head and neck of a long-necked dinosaur together because the head is so small and easily detached after the animal dies," said Univerity of Alberta doctoral student Tetsuto Miyashita.

The new species belongs to a group of dinosaurs called mamenchisaurids, known for their extremely long necks sometimes measuring up to half the length of their bodies.

Most sauropods, or long-necked dinosaurs, have necks only about one third the length of their bodies.

Unique among mamenchisaurids, Qijianglong had neck vertebrae that were filled with air, making their necks relatively lightweight despite their enormous size.

Interlocking joints between the vertebrae also indicate a surprisingly stiff neck that was much more mobile bending vertically than sideways, similar to a construction crane.

"Qijianglong is a cool animal. If you imagine a big animal that is half-neck, you can see that evolution can do quite extraordinary things," said Miyashita.

"Qijianglong shows that long-necked dinosaurs diversified in unique ways in Asia during Jurassic times--something very special was going on in that continent.

"Nowhere else we can find dinosaurs with longer necks than those in China. The new dinosaur tells us that these extreme species thrived in isolation from the rest of the world."

Mr Miyashita believes that mamenchisaurids evolved into many different forms when other long-necked dinosaurs went extinct in Asia.

It is possible that the dinosaurs were once isolated as a result of a large barrier such as a sea, and lost in competition with invading species when the land connection was restored later.

"It is still a mystery why mamenchisaurids did not migrate to other continents," he says.

The Qijianglong skeleton is now housed in a local museum in Qijiang.

"China is home to the ancient myths of dragons," says Miyashita, "I wonder if the ancient Chinese stumbled upon a skeleton of a long-necked dinosaur like Qijianglong and pictured that mythical creature."

The discovery was reported in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.

This article was written by Sarah Knapton Science Editor from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Millions of years before LSD and rock and roll, dinosaurs munched on psychedelic fungus, a new study suggests.

The hints that dinos got high come from the first amber fossil ever found of ergot, a grass parasite that can have poisonous and mind-altering effects on animals that nibble the dark fungi.

Ergot provided the precursor to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide).

And people who eat ergot-contaminated rye (or other ergot-tainted grains) develop powerful muscle spasms and hallucinations.

The phrase "St. Anthony's Fire" refers to both ergotism and the horrible burning feeling that ergot triggers by constricting blood vessels.

Now, it turns out that ergot has plagued grass-eaters since dinosaurs stomped the Earth. The hunk of amber from Myanmar encases an exquisitely preserved ergot fungus, perched atop a grass spikelet that grew about 100 million years ago, researchers report in the 2015 issue of the journal Palaeodiversity.

The amber was excavated in a mine and collected by Joerg Wunderlich, a German paleontologist.

"This establishes for sure that grasses were in the Old World 100 million years ago," said lead study author George Poinar Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University.

Evidence is mounting that grasses evolved alongside the dinosaurs, rather than after the giant reptiles disappeared. Fossils suggest the first grasslands appeared some 30 million years after the mass extinction that killed off the dinos at the end of the Cretaceous Period about 65 million years ago.

But even if grasses didn't spread widely early on, grasses discovered in dinosaur dung, and clues in pieces of amber, hint that grasses were around for creatures to graze on during the Cretaceous Period.

Fossilized dinosaur poop, known as coprolites, contains tiny cells found only in plants, several other studies have reported. The droppings are from sauropods, some of the largest plant-eating dinosaurs that ever lived.

No one knows when ergot fungus first attacked grass, but both fossils discovered inside the amber resemble modern species, Poinar said.

"It indicates that psychedelic compounds were present back in the Cretaceous," Poinar told Live Science. "What effect it had on animals is difficult to tell, but my feeling is dinosaurs definitely fed on this grass."

Researchers may also have to rethink the origins of ergot because of the new find. Earlier studies have suggested that ergot originated in South America toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, then migrated northward and spread to Europe and Africa. The amber fossils put the fungus firmly in the Old World, and the researchers suggested both grasses and their parasite were around since the older Jurassic Period, which lasted from about 199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago.

"Grasses probably go back to the Early Cretaceous Period and possibly even the Jurassic Period," Poinar said.

The amber relic is tiny — only about a half-inch (12 millimeters) long, and just about 0.2 inches (5 mm) wide and deep. The grass spikelet and ergot fungus resemble an ear of corn, with the leaves of grass wrapped around the "ear" of the dark, flowerlike fungus.

Amber is tree resin, and monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria) — the evergreen pines that looks like top-heavy Dr. Seuss trees — were the likely resin source, according to chemical tests and wood fibers found in amber from the same mine.

Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect that the amber was mined in Myanmar, not Malaysia.

Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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A 480-million-year-old fossil is giving paleontologists new insights into a sea monsterlike creature called an anomalocaridid, which is an ancestor of modern-day arthropods such as lobsters and scorpions, a new study finds.

The 7-foot-long (2 meters) fossil reveals that the extinct giant had two sets of legs, not one, as researchers previously thought. It also had a filter-feeding system that likely allowed it to consume plankton, the researchers found.

The researchers named the species Aegirocassis benmoulae after its discoverer, Mohamed Ben Moula, who found the fossil in southeastern Morocco in 2011. [See photos of anomalocaridid fossils and illustrations]

The fossil was "dirty and dusty" when the study's lead researcher, Peter Van Roy, a paleontologist at Yale University, got it into the lab. Van Roy was cleaning the specimen when he realized it had two sets of flaps on each body segment — indicating that the creature had two sets of legs.

"I was totally shocked" to see the two sets of legs, Van Roy told Live Science. "For a week on end, I actually went back to the specimen every day just to look at it again, to make sure that I wasn't seeing things," Van Roy told Live Science.

The fossil has helped researchers place the anomalocaridid within the arthropod family tree because it gives researchers an unfettered view of the beast, whose anatomy has stumped paleontologists for ages, he said.

Puzzling fossils

Researchers first identified anomalocaridid fossils in the 19th century, but the creature is so odd-looking — with a whalelike head, bristly appendages and a segmented body covered in flaps — that some people thought the fossilized body parts belonged to several different animals, instead of just one, Van Roy said.

Researchers finally pieced the animal together in a 1985 study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions B. But parts of its anatomy remained a mystery.

"Anomalocaridids seemed to lack front limbs," Van Roy said. "Being an arthropod — being a joint-legged animal — and not having legs, it's kind of embarrassing."

The new fossil helps show that anomalocaridids had two separate sets of flaps per body segment, the researchers said. The upper flap is analogous to the upper limb of modern arthropods, and the lower flaps resembled modified legs that were adapted for swimming. [Cambrian Creatures: Photos of Primitive Sea Life]

"We didn't know these animals had two sets of flaps (an upper one and a lower one) because the fossils we had were all so flattened," said Greg Edgecombe, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the study.

Van Roy and his colleagues looked back at older anomalocaridid fossils and found they did have the upper and lower flaps seen in the new fossil — showing that researchers had overlooked these limbs in the past.

The finding shows anomalocaridids arose very early in arthropod evolution, Van Roy said.

Filter feeders

The A. benmoulae fossil also shows that the animal was a filter feeder, an animal that strains plankton and other food from the water, much like a modern baleen whale or sponge. Other anomalocaridids from earlier eras were predators that caught prey with their spiny head limbs, the researchers said.

The animal's great size suggests that the oceans had ample plankton during that time, Van Roy said.

The findings are "fantastic," said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, a research fellow in paleobiology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who was not involved with the study.

"A little over a decade ago, it would have been nearly laughable to think that almost 500-million-year-old arthropodscould have reached more than 2 meters in size, and had an ecology similar to that of modern whales," Ortega-Hernandez wrote in an email. "Fortunately, we now have the fossils, and they almost speak for themselves."

The study was published online today (March 11) in the journal Nature.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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I remember exactly where I was when I first watched Jurassic Park — hiding behind a couch at my dad's friend's house, hands covering my ears to muffle the terrifying sound of dinosaur yelps and roars spewing from his surround-sound speakers.

Had I known what I was actually listening to, I might have been far more terrified — and traumatized.

Those sounds, it turns out, are bonafide recordings of real animals.

But they're engaged in an activity you might not expect for a 1993 PG-13 film: having sex.

The film's sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, spent months recording and fine-tuning these sounds, he told Kyle Buchanan over at Vulture.

"If people knew where the sounds in Jurassic Park came from, it'd be rated R!" Rydstrom says.

In the film, each dinosaur species has a distinct set of sounds. Some are R-rated, others are a bit more mild, but still surprisingly strange.

Here's how they made the most iconic dinosaur sounds:

Barking Velociraptors

The strange, bark-like sounds that the film's raptors use to communicate is actually the sound of tortoises having sex. Really.

"It's somewhat embarrassing,"Rydstrom told Vulture.

Stampede of Gallimimus

I still can't forget the feeling of my adrenaline racing as I listened to a stampede of screeching creatures as they chased doctors Grant and Satler (played by Sam Neil and Laura Dern) through the forest.

In reality, though, the high-pitched squawking sounds those little guys make are terrifying for an altogether different reason: They're actually the sound of a female horse squealing at a male horse when he got "a little too close" and she got excited, Rydstrom said,

Magical Brachiosaurus

Remember the magical moment in the movie where doctors Grant and Satler are captivated by the sound of the slow-moving, long-necked Brachiosaurus as it chomps on its leafy lunch in the forest?

Get ready to be disappointed. That enchanting moment comes courtesy of a pretty non-magical creature: the donkey.

"You think of donkeys, and they kind of yodel, you know? There's this pitch shift in donkey vocals, and if you slow them way down, you get almost a hooting, songlike quality,"Rydstrom told Vulture. As it turns out, slowing down small-animal noises is how Rydstrom gets a lot of his bigger-sounding animal roars.

Terrifying T-Rex

As I remember it, the Tyrannosaurus rex was the star of the film — it's biggest, scariest character. Yet the majority of its sounds came from none other than Rydstrom's own pet, a petite Jack Russell terrier named Buster. It's characteristic roar, on the other hand, is actually the sound of a baby elephant.

Dying Triceratops

The triceratops sounds were from dozens of cows from George Lucas' film site, Skywalker Ranch, where Rydstrom works. As for the unforgettable sound of the dying triceratops, though, Rydstrom turned to a simple, homemade device: a cardboard tube with a spring in it. "When Sam Neill puts his ear right up to the chest cavity of the triceratops and listens to its breathing, there's a lot of cow in there, but the key element of the breathing is mostly me breathing into a tube,"Rydstrom told Vulture.

Read the full list of dino-noises over at Vulture>

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The Brontosaurus is back. Or at least it should be, according to a new analysis of the long-necked dinosaur family tree.

The study researchers suggest the dinosaur currently known as Apatosaurus excelsus is different enough from its Apatosaurian kin as to be a different dinosaur altogether. Because A. excelsus was famously first known as Brontosaurus until 1903, the species would revert back to that original name and become Brontosaurus once again.

It's a proposal that excites some paleontologists and leaves others skeptical, but researchers say it's entirely possible that Brontosaurus may eventually regain its place in the scientific nomenclature. [See Images of an Apatosaurus Discovery]

"The big picture is, there are independent groups of researchers looking at these dinos and these relationships, and they are independently arriving at the same conclusion, that the diversity of this family of dinosaurs is greater than previously recognized," said Matthew Mossbrucker, the director and curator of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Colorado.

Mossbrucker was not involved in the new study, but is "wholly in favor of bringing the genus Brontosaurus back," he said.

Brontosaurus background

The saga of Brontosaurus is as long as this sauropod's snakelike neck. In 1877, the geologist Arthur Lakes sent paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh some fossilized bones, which Marsh described as a new late-Jurassic sauropod,Apatosaurus ajax. In 1879, Marsh's team found another long-necked dino in the same era rock, which Marsh concluded was a different genus and species altogether — Brontosaurusexcelsus.

The Brontosaurus name was not long-lasting, however. In 1903, the paleontologist Elmer Riggs determined that A. ajaxand B. excelsus were more closely related than Marsh had believed. Apatosaurus, being the first named, took precedence, and Brontosaurus was no more. Instead, the dinosaur species once known as B. excelsus became A. excelsus. The Brontosaurus moniker persisted in popular culture, but not among scientists.

Not among most scientists, anyway. There have been occasional calls to re-examine the species. Paleontologist Bob Bakker, the curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, has argued for a revision of the A. excelsus name since the 1990s.

"These guys should never have been lumped [together] back in 1903 or '04," Bakker told Live Science. He cites differences in the A. excelsus shoulder blade, head and neck that separate it from other Apatosaurs. But the only systematic analysis of Apatosaurus traits, published in the National Science Museum Monographs in 2004, upheld the current naming conventions.

Revising the family tree

The new research examines not only Apatosaurs, but all long-necks in the Diplodocidae family, the group that includes Apatosaurs and Diplodocuses. The researchers examined 477 different morphological traits from individual specimens found in museums in Europe and the United States. The study started simply, said lead researcher Emanuel Tschopp, a paleontologist at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal. [6 Strange Species Discovered in Museums]

"The idea was to identify some new skeletons that there are in a museum in Switzerland down to the species," Tschopp told Live Science. "At some point, we figured out that in order to do this, we also had to revise the species taxonomy of the group because it was not known in enough detail to really see where our new specimens would belong."

Tschopp and his colleagues cataloged the differences in various bony features of Diplodocidae dinosaurs and used a statistical method to quantify how different each dino was from the others. From there, they separated the specimens into individual species and genera, or closely related groups of species.

The most provocative result was how much A. excelsus stood out.

"We found that the differences between the genus Brontosaurus and the genus Apatosaurus are so numerous that they should be kept apart as two different genera," Tschopp said.

Most notably, he said, Apatosaurus would have had a wider, more robust neck than Brontosaurus. The findings appear today (April 7) in the open-access journal PeerJ.

Dino debate

Tschopp's work did not take into account Apatosaurus excelsus' skull, because paleontologists disagree about whether a true skull of this animal has ever been found. Bakker and Mossbrucker argue there is good evidence that true skulls have been found; other paleontologists are skeptical of the field drawings and diagrams of Arthur Lakes, who found the original Apatosaurus specimens in the late 1800s.

If Bakker and Mossbrucker are right, the skulls of A. excelsus and other Apatosaurians bolster the Brontosaurus claim. The nasal chambers in A. excelsus' probable skull fossils are larger than in other species, Bakker said, which would have made its bellows higher-pitched. Its muzzle, shoulders and neck joints are different, which would have altered its maneuverability and posture, Bakker added. All of these changes mattered ecologically.

"It's important to recognize the distinctions, because this group of critters, the long-neck Apatosaurs, evolved faster than we've been giving them credit for, and they evolved in sectors of anatomy that are really interesting," Bakker said. "Why would they change their head-neck posture? Why? I suspect part of it might be social behavior, the way they signaled to each other with head flips and chin bobs."

But discerning behavior and evolution from bone shapes and features is a tricky business.

"The question for me is when we look at these changes, and we say the shape of this bone is different, the shape of that bone is different, it's hard for me to say that they are equivalent changes," said John Whitlock, a paleontologist at Mount Aloysius College, who was not involved in the study but who reviewed it for publication. For example, one change could require the alteration of 400 nucleotides of DNA, Whitlock told Live Science, and another just a couple of nucleotides.

"Evolutionarily speaking, those are not necessarily equivalent," he said.

If anything is certain, it's that bringing back Brontosaurus will require a lot more debate (and, ultimately, a ruling by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature).

"For sure, there will be other researchers that are maybe not convinced or have their own evidence against the separation of the two," Tschopp said. "In the end, this is how science works."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For extinct creatures like dinosaurs known only from fossils, it is notoriously difficult to differentiate the males from the females of a species because sex distinctions are rarely obvious from the skeletons.

But in the case of the well-known Jurassic dinosaur Stegosaurus, a study published on Wednesday may provide a handy how-to guide on telling the boys from the girls based on the shape of the big bony plates protruding from its back.

Stegosaurus, which roamed the western United States about 150 million years ago, was a large, four-legged plant-eater with two rows of plates along its back, as well as two pairs of spikes at the end of its tail to clobber predators.

The largest Stegosaurus species reached about 30 feet (9 meters). The species in this study, Stegosaurus mjosi, measured roughly 21 feet (6.5 meters).

A Montana Stegosaurus "graveyard" contained fossils of several individuals, with plates coming in two distinct varieties: some wide, others tall.

The wide ones reached sizes 45 percent larger in surface area than the taller ones, which were nearly 3 feet (90 cm) high.

"Males typically invest more into their ornamentation than do females, so the larger wide plates were likely from males," said Evan Saitta, a 23-year-old paleontology graduate student at Britain's University of Bristol whose study appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The broad, thin structure of the plates and their positioning on the back of the animal suggests that they were used in sexual display, analogous to the tail of a peacock. The broad, wide plates likely made a continuous display surface along the animal's back to attract mates, like a billboard."

To test whether the plate differences were instead because some individuals were young and others old, CT scans and microscopic analyses were performed that showed the bone tissue had ceased growing, meaning both varieties came from full-grown adults.

Anatomical and other differences between the sexes of a single species, like a male lion's mane or a male deer's antlers, are called sexual dimorphism.

Sexual dimorphism examples have been proposed in other dinosaurs, but many scientists find those inconclusive. Saitta said the Stegosaurus plates may be "the most convincing evidence for sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs to date."

University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton added, "It suggests that many dinosaurs used sexual display, as birds and mammals do today, usually the males displaying or mock fighting to attract attention of females."

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Chilesaurus, an entirely new dinosaur species, was apparently the Mr. Potato Head of the Late Jurassic. As described today in a study in the journal Nature, Chilesaurus had the teeth of an apatosaur, the arms of an allosaur and the axial skeleton of a ceratosaur. 

A member of the theropod clade, Chilesaurus was essentially an adorable, turkey-sized, vegetarian T-Rex.

“It’s a new species, genus and completely new lineage of dinosaurs that wasn’t known before,” says Martín Ezcurra, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham and coauthor of the study.

“Theropods were quite common during the Mesozoic, but in this part of Chile, this is the first plant-eating theropod dinosaur.”

Seven-year-old Diego Suarez initially stumbled across the Chilesaurus fossils in 2005, while hiking with his parents near the Andes mountains.

The skeletons were remarkably complete, but paleontologists were less excited—they assumed that Suarez had discovered several different species of well-known theropods. It was only in 2008, when scientists looked more closely at the findings, that they realized the skeletons likely represented an entirely new, albeit enigmatic, species.

“The most interesting thing about this new dinosaur is that different parts of the body resemble different, unrelated groups,” Ezcurra says. “It show us how convergence evolution works.” (Convergence evolution is when organisms evolve certain traits independently, due to having to contend with similar conditions—not a common ancestry).

After the fossils were carefully removed from the surrounding rock—a process that took about five years—Ezcurra and his team began their analysis. They were surprised to find that all signs point to Chilesaurus belonging to Therapoda, a clade that includes velociraptors and tyrannosauruses, as well as modern bird species. From the paper:

“The bizarre anatomy of Chilesaurus raises interesting questions about its phylogenetic relationships. We scored Chilesaurus into four different integrative archosauriform, theropod and sauropodomorph data sets. Remarkably, all these analyses placed Chilesaurus as a member of Theropoda, near the origin of tetanurans.”

Ezcurra suspects that Chilesaurus’ novelty within dinosaur lineages will make it a prime subject for future study. “I think a lot of people will be very interested in studying this dinosaur,” he says. “It’s so different from other groups that its relationships in the genealogical tree of dinosaurs will prove very interesting.”

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So, the name Brontosaurus is back in business.

After comparing, analysing, measuring and coding an extraordinary amount of anatomical detail pertaining to diplodocid sauropods, Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues have produced the largest-ever phylogenetic analysis of sauropods (Tschopp et al. 2015).

Their work is published in the recently launched open-access journal PeerJ (a venue that I and colleagues have used as well: Naish et al. 2014).

Tschopp et al. (2015) is quite the impressive piece of work: it's not just gargantuan in terms of coding effort (477 characters: not bad at all) but is also specimen-based, coding for 49 diplodocids in addition to a large number of additional sauropods.

A great many of these are animals previously referred to species of Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus and so on, but specimens referred to less familiar diplodocoid taxa like Dinheirosaurus, Suuwassea, Tornieria, Kaatedocus and Leinkupal are included as well. And, just to prove how awesome the study is, it follows the nomenclatural recommendations put forward by Taylor & Naish (2005).

Tschopp et al.'s (2015) primary conclusions are already well known: within Apatosaurinae, the Brontosaurus type species (B. excelsus) does not fall within the clade termed Apatosaurus, meaning that Brontosaurus is once more a valid name.

Meanwhile, the diplodocine previously termed Diplodocus hayi is found not to group with Diplodocus at all, instead forming a sister-group relationship with the clade that includes Diplodocus, Kaatedocus and Barosaurus. Accordingly, hayi needs a new name and is now Galeamopus hayi (Tschopp et al. 2015). This matches previous statements about its anatomy, and the views of authors who have doubted its inclusion within Diplodocus.

Several specimens previously identified as Diplodocus are identified as additional Galeamopus specimens. In fact, ironically, "the morphology of Galeamopus can be considered better known than that of Diplodocus, for which information on the skull, forelimb, and distal tail morphology is not available from type specimens" (Tschopp et al. 2015, p. 274).

UP NEXT: The Brontosaurus is back

SEE ALSO: Dinosaurs may have eaten a psychedelic fungus similar to LSD

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered the subtle difference between how dogs and cats drink water

Another batch of 43 fossilized dinosaur eggs was found in a Chinese region known for its prehistoric bounty. An abundance of red sandstone rock formations there helped preserve hundreds of eggs, 11 fossilized skeletons, and nearly 200 footprint fossils.

This video originally appeared on Slate Video. Watch More: slate.com/video

Jim Festante is an actor/writer in Los Angeles and regular video contributor to Slate. He's the author of the Image Comics miniseries The End Times of Bram and Ben.

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Birds have an amazing array of beaks, from the curved snout of a flamingo, to the delicate and deadly beak of an owl, to the rounder snout of the dino-chicken.

If you haven't heard of a dino-chicken before, don't feel bad. It was only recently created by scientists at Yale. In a study published today in the journal Evolution, researchers manipulated chicken embryos so that they would grow with the snout of a Velociraptor.

But living out a real-life version of Jurassic Park was TOTALLY NOT THE POINT say the researchers.

“Our goal here was to understand the molecular underpinnings of an important evolutionary transition, not to create a ‘dino-chicken’ simply for the sake of it,” lead author Bhart-Anjan Bhullar said in a statement, thereby ensuring that the image of a dino-chicken would be permanently embedded in your brain.

In order to get a better insight into how dinosaur snouts, rounded and with a different bone structure turned into modern beaks, Bhullar and colleagues looked at fossils of beaked dinosaurs and the bones of modern birds. They figured out that there was a particular pattern of gene expression in birds that wasn't there in mammals or reptiles. The particular gene expression controlled the shape of the beak.

By introducing an inhibitor to stop the genetic signal that tells the embryo to build a bird beak, the scientists were able to make the chicken embryos grow a snout and palate that resembles their ancestors, the dinosaurs.

The shape of the palates (upper part of the mouth) of a chicken (left) the experimental embryo (center) and a dinosaur (right). The shape and structure of the experimental embryo's palate is more similar to a dinosaur than a chicken.

There are no plans to have dino-chickens pecking in a coop in Brooklyn, but the researchers do suggest that this method could be used to identify other evolutionary transformations.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

SEE ALSO: Paleontologists find differences between girl dinosaurs and boy dinosaurs

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Some 18,000 species, great and small, were discovered in 2014, adding to the 2 million already known, scientists said on Thursday, as they released a "Top 10" list that highlights the diversity of life.

The 10 are "a reminder of the wonders awaiting us," said Quentin Wheeler, president of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, which issues the list. An estimated 10 million species are still unknown to science.

But researchers have to move fast: development, poaching, and climate change are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than science can discover them.

Two animals made the list because of unusual parenting.

A wasp from China is the first animal found to use chemical weapons to thwart predators that might have designs on its offspring. Mothers fill part of their nest with dead ants, which give off volatile chemicals that mask the scent of larvae, throwing off would-be predators.

A frog from Indonesia breaks the rule of anuran reproduction. Rather than laying eggs, as almost all the world's 6,455 species of frogs do, or giving birth to froglets, it deposits tadpoles into shallow pools.

One of the top 10, dubbed "the chicken from hell," is extinct. The feathered dinosaur whose partial skeletons were unearthed in the Dakotas was a contemporary of T. rex and Triceratops.

Two species caught the list-makers' attention for their performance art.

A spider from the sand dunes of Morocco cartwheels to thwart predators, moving twice as fast as when it runs, while a pufferfish from Japan turns out to be the creator of intricate circles on the sea floor which had mystified scientists for 20 years. Males construct the circles, meant to attract females, by swimming and wriggling in the sand.

Since no top-10 list would be complete without an entry that made it on looks, SUNY included a photogenic blue, red, and gold sea slug from Japan.

More than a pretty face, it could shed light on how algae in a sea slug's gut produce nutrients for the slug out of corals it eats.

The release of the top 10 is timed around the May 23 birthday of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish botanist and zoologist who founded modern taxonomy.

The full list, with photographs, is at http://www.esf.edu/top10/.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Richard Chang)

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NOW WATCH: The real 'Jurassic World' is in China — 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been found in the same city

Pixar’s next film “Inside Out” isn’t even in theaters yet, but the studio is already starting to tease its big November feature, the dinosaur/human buddy comedy “The Good Dinosaur.”

The studio released the film’s first teaser—which really doesn’t tell you anything about the movie at all, other than the fact that it takes place on an Earth that was never hit by the asteroid that triggered the dinosaurs' extinction. Like most teasers, it doesn’t divulge much, but it does build to a pretty fun sight gag and some “Lion King”-esque art. 

Frankly, it’s just great to know that this movie’s on track after a long and tumultuous development that upended Pixar’s release schedule and led to a large number of layoffs. Pixar’s shine may have started to wear off ever so slightly with its dependence on sequels and prequels, but it really is exciting to see the storied studio releasing two back-to-back original films for 2015. 

“The Good Dinosaur” arrives in theaters November 25, 2015.

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Yes, this is for real.

No, there isn't dinosaur DNA trapped in amber, waiting to be replicated and cloned.

But that's not the only way to make a dino, said Jack Horner, the paleontologist who worked on "Jurassic World" (and the rest of the "Jurassic Park" films), and he wants to make it happen.

How did we get to this point, where Horner — one of the main inspirations for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" character Alan Grant— thinks we can make a live dinosaur within five to 10 years?

"It all started with 'Jurassic Park,'" Horner told Business Insider in an interview.

In 1993, the same year the first movie came out, he and then-graduate student Mary Schweitzer, who has continued to make some amazing discoveries in the field of paleontology, tried to extract DNA from dinosaur bones.

They failed. DNA basically starts coming apart as soon as a cell dies, says Horner, and no one has ever found intact dinosaur DNA — he doesn't think it's possible. "If you did the thing they did in 'Jurassic Park,'" says Horner (referring to the story's solution of filling in dino DNA gaps with frog DNA), "you'd basically have a frog."

About 20 years of genetics research later, however, Horner has another plan — and it relies on the fact that we have a more effective way to get "dinosaur" DNA.

Going back in time

We have creatures on the planet that are the direct descendants of dinosaurs: birds. And if you ask a paleontologist, birds are dinosaurs, specifically avian dinosaurs.

They might not look like dinosaurs, but birds have feathers, just like dinosaurs, including the ferocious velociraptor. Over time, their descendants' snouts turned into beaks, they stopped growing tails, and wings further evolved into modern bird wings.

But birds didn't necessarily lose the genes that code for tails or arms or snouts — instead, those same traits most likely exist in their genetic code, inactive, while the newer genes for wings, tail feathers, and beaks are expressed.

Horner thinks that we can suppress these new genes and express the atavistic, throwback dinosaurian genes instead. And his plan is to do this first with a well-researched bird that we're all familiar with, a chicken, giving us... a "chickenosaurus," as he described in a TED talk, or a "dino-chicken."

Picture it: a small, feathered creature, with a tail that helps it balance, small arms with claws, and a toothy snout, instead of a beak.

Remember, real velociraptors were just the size of a large turkey.

Horner has talked about pet dinosaurs for a while. Publishers of his book, "How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever" came out in 2009, originally planned to release it around the same time as "Jurassic Park 4."

Basically, Horner says, he's trying to discover the genetic pathways that turned birds into the modern creatures we know, so we can turn back the clock on a chicken's evolutionary history.

And as wild as this may sound, Horner's not the only one doing this type of work. A pair of Harvard and Yale scientists recently announced they'd found a way to turn chicken beaks back into dinosaur snouts. Skeptics think building a dino snout won't be so easy, and will involve as-yet undiscovered genetics. But the researchers counter that their work shows just how fast the science in this field is developing.

Horner says we can look at the beak study as a "proof of concept" that this reverse engineering process is feasible.

That Harvard-Yale team is working on the beak. In 2014, another group reported in PLOS Biology they'd figured out how dinosaur arms fused into wings. Horner is working on the tail. And he thinks that with the right funding, we can reverse-engineer and grow a dinosaur in five to ten years.

Creating something new

If researchers reverse-engineer a bird, they'd have some sort of dinosaur, though it would still be a new species — the process by which modern birds evolved happened over tens of millions of years, and the few changes we're talking about here probably wouldn't represent an exact creature that existed 65 million years ago.

And dinosaurs that weren't of the avian variety still wouldn't be represented. We have no modern descendant of a stegosaurus or a brontosaurus (newly restored to real dino status).

But the rapidly changing world of genetics could open up the possibility for creating animals just like, say, a triceratops.

Horner says that if we were interested, we could genetically engineer creatures like these, or like anything else we can figure out a genetic code for, even if it never existed in nature. Once we figure out the genes that create a trait, those genes could potentially be incorporated into an animal. We've already done this. Researchers used the genes from jellyfish to make rabbits that glow in the dark, and other researchers made mice with transparent skin. Once we know the code for a trait, we could use that to make a creature.

Horner uses a unicorn as an example — we'd just need to add genes for a horn. "We could probably get to a unicorn before we get to a dino-chicken," he says.

So why do it?

Though some of this might sound like it's totally out there, there are practical applications. If Horner's team figures out how to make a tail grow, that might unlock the ability to better understand the growth of vertebrae and neural tissue, with fascinating medical implications.

He also thinks "if we can make a dino-chicken, it's pretty cool." It might help get kids interested in genetics at a young age — what kid doesn't love dinosaurs?

Plus, Horner points out that we've been genetically modifying the genes of animals for thousands of years. We've just called it "breeding."

"People made chihuahuas out of wolves, for God's sake," he says.

SEE ALSO: 10 super-genes that scientists could someday program into your body

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NOW WATCH: The new 'Jurassic World' trailer shows why it took $190 million to make this summer blockbuster

"Jurassic World," the latest installment of the "Jurassic Park" franchise, will open this summer to fan expectations of bigger, better dinosaurs. While the studio might deliver on that front, this latest flick sadly continues a long "Jurassic" tradition of bad and incomplete science. Here's how "Jurassic World" still can't get the science right. 

"Jurassic World" opens on Friday, June 12th. 

Produced by Kevin Reilly. Video courtesy of Universal Pictures

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Paris (AFP) - Scientists said Tuesday they have discovered what appear to be red blood cells and collagen fibres in dinosaur bones, a find that may boost prospects of prising organic remains from a much wider range of fossils.

Using molecular microscopy, a British team analysed eight bone fragments from dinosaurs that lived some 75 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period.

The fossils were so poorly conserved that it was impossible to tell precisely what type of animal some of them came from, study co-author Sergio Bertazzo from Imperial College London told AFP.

The samples included the claw of a meat-eating dinosaur, a few toe bones from a ceratopsid (a group that included the horned Triceratops) and a duck-billed hadrosaur, and rib fragments from an unknown species.

All the bones are from the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, and have been in the Natural History Museum in London since they were collected about 100 years ago.

"What we found are structures that could be original red blood cells from the dinosaur specimens and also other structures that could be the original collagen fibres," Bertazzo said by email.

"Therefore we indicate that the likelihood of finding organic material in fossils is much higher than previously thought, at least at the microscopic scale," said Bertazzo.Other researchers have previously found remnants of organic material in dinosaur bones, but in exceptionally well-preserved fossils — which are few and far between.

It had long been thought that protein molecules cannot survive for longer than four million years.

Bertazzo and a team used a special microscope which uses a beam of heavy atoms to make infinitely small cuts in a sample at the nanometric scale (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre).

"The same microscope also has a robotic arm with a micro needle that can be used to pick up and move things inside the microscope," explained Bertazzo.

"So, combining the beam and the needle, we could cut small bits of the fossils and perform an analysis to check for any fragment of amino acids."

The team had set out to analyse gaps left in bone by decomposed organic material, instead finding structures that appear to be red blood cells, and fibres similar to collagen, a protein which makes up the bulk of connective tissues in animals.

Blown away

 "Totally blown away!" is how Bertazzo described the team's breakthrough, while cautioning that further evidence is needed to confirm the nature of the structures.

"This was absolutely not what we were expecting to find at all. It actually took quite a while for us to be convinced of what we saw."

The team compared their ancient soft tissue to an Emu blood sample, and intriguingly found "similarities."

Dinosaurs are distant ancestors of modern-day birds, and scientists are hoping this type of research will reveal how, and when, a cold-blooded lizard gave rise to warm-blooded birds with a fast metabolism.

In vertebrate animals, the smaller the blood cell, the higher the metabolic rate, said Bertazzo.

"If we can find blood cells in lots of different dinosaurs, the range in size might provide an independent line of evidence for when dinosaurs became warm-blooded," he said.

The main breakthrough of the research is to show that this type of soft tissue preservation is likely much more common than once thought, and Bertazzo said he "cannot even begin to speculate about what can be found in future."

As for the possibility of one day discovering DNA, however, "many more studies should be done before we are even able to say if it is possible or not."

UP NEXT: Here's the disturbing way the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic Park were made

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NOW WATCH: 5 science facts 'Jurassic World' totally ignored

When it was first released during the summer of 1993, "Jurassic Park" not only captured the imaginations of viewers with its dazzling special effects, it also made dinosaurs cool again, and made the public interested in paleontology.

"It had a big influence on me in wanting to study Paleontology."Dr. John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biomechanist and professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London, explained to Business Insider. "The original film was a landmark in cinema, in many ways and also an important moment in Paleontology that influenced a lot of people including me."

Our understanding of dinosaurs has changed a lot in the 22 years since "Jurassic Park" debuted in theaters, however, and the film ignores these changes.

A few years after the first film came out, it was discovered that some dinosaurs were feathered. While you won't find any feathers on the dinos in "Jurassic Park," the film does cling to the theory that dinosaurs had more in common with birds than reptiles.

"I bet you'll never look at birds the same way again," Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) muses while watching a T. rex take a Gallimimus down. 

In reality, the T. rex was still a flesh-eating carnivore. However, its actual feathered appearance diverges from the popular image of it as seen in "Jurassic Park."

While some interpret that prehistoric beasts were covered entirely in feathers, others think the feathers were just "filaments and strands," as Dr. Mark Norell, current Chairman of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, tells Business Insider.

However, it's no longer just a theory that dinosaurs had bird-like features: It is a flat-out fact. 

"The distinction between what is a bird and what is a dinosaur has really gone away." said Norell.

Here's what T. rex looked like in "Jurassic Park":

And this is what scientists today think the T. rex really looked like:

Take note of the small, feathered arms and bird-like feet:

Yet, the newly discovered physical appearance hasn't altered how the "Jurassic Park" franchise has portrayed its dinosaurs. 

In "Jurassic World," you will not find a single feather, but rather the same, reptile-like appearances found in previous films.

"Jurassic World" director Colin Trevorrow announced this in a simple way on Twitter in March 2013:

This decision goes beyond the justification of artistic license into what some paleontologists believe is scientific irresponsibility.

"Well, I understand the primary mission of the movie is to tell a story and everything has to lend itself towards telling that story,"Hutchinson said. "It doesn't contribute to telling the story in some way then it's not so important. But if part of the story and the selling point of the movie is 'this is a scientifically accurate, believable vision of what could be,' then scientific accuracy begins to matter more and more." 

Hutchinson notes the original film was praised by the scientific community for sticking to the science as much as humanly possible, with a notable exception.

"If you are kind of marketing the movie as a scientific vision, then I think the 'Jurassic Park' films have given up on that largely." Hutchinson added.

There's no arguing that the T. rex of "Jurassic Park" is terrifying. Some might believe adding feathers to it would have made it less scary, especially when a lot of scientists now compare it to a "big chicken."

Hutchinson, however, believes the opposite. 

"There's still a significant sector of the public that don't like the idea of dinosaurs with feathers and think its less scary. But I think that's totally wrong. If you actually put some thought into it you can make feathered dinosaurs incredibly terrifying." Hutchinson said.

Norell concurred. 

"I think any animal that's over 40 feet long and 12 feet high at the hip, and has, you know, six inch long teeth, I mean, if it was in a clown suit it would still look scary." Norell said. 

If Spielberg and Trevorrow took these changes into account, it might have made for a stranger, more unique "Jurassic World" that completely veered away from the franchise. 

However, just because paleontologists are displeased with the science, that doesn't mean that "Jurassic World" won't be a fun time at the movies. 

"You know, people have to realize that these films are entertainment." Norell said. "I remember back when one of the films came out several years ago, I said that these films are to Paleontology what 'Star Trek' is to Stephen Hawking...They're not documentaries, they're pure fantasies and storytelling. And when I say that, I'm not making a judgment on them at all because of course fantasy storytelling can be really great. It's just...they're not textbooks about dinosaur paleontology."

Feathers or not still won't stop scientists from seeing "Jurassic World."

When asked if he would go see "Jurassic World," Hutchinson succinctly answered, "Sure...yeah."

SEE ALSO: The velociraptors in the 'Jurassic Park' movies are nothing like their real-life counterparts

AND: An Earth, Wind, and Fire song inspired Spielberg to create one of the most terrifying scenes from 'Jurassic Park'

AND: THEN & NOW: The cast of 'Jurassic Park' 22 years later

AND: Here's how the 'Jurassic World' dinosaurs looked in real life

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NOW WATCH: The new 'Jurassic World' trailer shows why it took $190 million to make this summer blockbuster

Jack Horner — the paleontologist who's served as technical advisor on all of the Jurassic Park films — thinks that he can make a real dinosaur in the next five to 10 years. Horner's idea for a dinosaur, however, is a slightly altered chicken he calls a "dino-chicken."

We here at Business Insider were hoping for something more frightening to get in the spirit of the latest film "Jurassic World". So, to conjure an idea of what it would feel like, size-wise, to live in a real Jurassic world, we've created this graphic, which includes some of the dinosaurs that appear in the film.

*Note that all of the numbers in this graphic, which are taken from a series of dinosaur sizes provided in this Wikipedia page, are measurements based on scientific excavation and analysis and don't necessarily resemble some of the scientifically-inaccurate dinosaurs that appear in the film, such as the Velociraptor. 

LEARN MORE: The paleontologist who worked on 'Jurassic World' is trying to create a real dinosaur within 5 to 10 years

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NOW WATCH: 5 science facts 'Jurassic World' totally ignored

It is well-known at this point that "Jurassic World," the latest installment of the "Jurassic Park" franchise, diverges from the science when it comes to its portrayal of dinosaurs.

In real life, many of the dinosaurs vary in size and are often covered in feathers, but a few of them actually don't look that different.

Let's start with Velociraptor, one of the most feared creatures in the "Jurassic Park" universe:

In reality, the Velociraptor could be more easily compared to either a turkey or a coyote:

The look of Velociraptors in the film was actually based more off of Deinonychus ...

... as well as a Utahraptor which was discovered as the original "Jurassic Park" was being made:

One of the most terrifying new dinosaurs introduced in "Jurassic World" is the Mosasaurus, which makes even a great white shark look tiny.

The real Mosasaurus isn't actually a dinosaur and it didn't have spikes along its back.

The Mosasaurus is really "marine lizard that's more closely related to snakes and lizards," according to Dr. John Hutchinson. 

However, that is nowhere near the biggest problem with the film's depiction.

According to Mark Witton, an illustrator who researches and specializes in dinosaurs, that misconception is based off depictions of this animal from the 1890s. The mistake was cleared up in the early 1900s. 

"The ["Jurassic World"] press has been showing their mosasaur has a series of scutes along it's back, similar to depictions of these animals by artists working in the 1890s. These Victorian artists were misled by bones which had dislocated from the throat to lie along the top of fossil skeletons, but this mistake was recognised by the early 1900s." Witton told Business Insider. "Indeed, we actually know quite a lot about mosasaur skin, and that they went to some length to be very streamlined and smooth."

After making a brief cameo in "Jurassic Park," the Gallimimus returned for "Jurassic World":

The real Gallimimus was actually fairly similar, but with a lot more feathers.

Here is a Pteranodon, the unlucky victim of the much larger Mosasaurus:

And here's a sketch of what the winged animal (who isn't actually a dinosaur) probably looked like:

The Pteranodon was actually a Pterosaur, which is "a winged reptile which is very, very, very closely related to dinosaurs but not a dinosaur," according to Hutchinson.

Witton, who has consulted on several films about Pterosaurs in general, called the "Jurassic World" interpretation of the Pteranodon "among the worst reconstructions [he's] ever seen."

"No pterosaur had feet like that, and they certainly couldn't pick things up with them as shown in the trailers." Witton told Business Insider.

And finally, there's the almighty T. rex:

The real T. rex was still huge, but it was actually covered in feathers. 

Some have jokingly compared the T. rex to a "giant chicken." But still, would you want to mess with it?

"Jurassic World" opens in theaters Friday.

SEE ALSO: ‘Jurassic World’ completely ignores these important discoveries scientists have made about dinosaurs

AND: The velociraptors in the 'Jurassic Park' movies are nothing like their real-life counterparts

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NOW WATCH: 5 science facts 'Jurassic World' totally ignored