Produced by Monica Manalo. Graphics by Skye Gould. Research by Jessica Orwig.
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If you were among the dinosaur-loving hordes that helped Jurassic World to the biggest opening weekend in movie history, then you've already met the park's aquatic attraction: a massive ancient carnivore that would have cruised the world's oceans some 80 million to 66 million years ago.
Here's what we know about the mighty Mosasaurus.
1. Mosasaurs are not dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are distinguished from other reptiles that once roamed the earth by, of all things, their hip sockets. The term "dinosaur" is actually very specific and describes only the land-dwelling descendants of the "ruling reptiles", the archosaurs. Mosasaurs, on the other hand, are more closely related to modern-day lizards.
2. It took a while to figure out what a mosasaur actually was
The first time a fragment of a mosasaur skull was found, in The Netherlands in 1764, it was mistaken for a fish. In the decades that followed, it was described as a giant crocodile and even a sperm whale. After French Revolutionary forces seized the skull while attacking the Fortress of Maastricht where it was held, French scientists argued over whether it was a crocodile, a whale or a giant monitor lizard.
It wasn't until 1822 that palaeontologist William Daniel Conybeare officially assigned the skull to a still-undescribed ancient reptile, which he named Mosasaurus.
3. It's taking a while to figure out what they're related to
As with a lot of things in science, their proper place in the tree of life is still being debated by palaeontologists. Originally, the ancient reptiles were thought to belong in the same order as snakes, given that they shared the trait of a double-hinged jaw. However, scientists later revised this theory, and mosasaurs found themselves reassigned to the same order as monitor lizards. Now, some scientists seem to be leaning towards the original snake theory once again.
4. They gave birth to live young.
Mosasaurs were reptiles, but some common mosasaur traits differ vastly from those you'd find in other marine reptiles. For example, most modern marine reptiles, like sea turtles and marine iguanas, lay eggs up on the shore. But mosasaurs would have given birth to live young in the water, and may even have given their offspring some parental protection.
5. There were lots of different mosasaurs
There were many species of mosasaurs. Smaller species were only around three metres long, but larger ones could grow to a gigantic 12-15 metres!
6. Some mosasaurs had shark-like tails
Until fairly recently, experts thought mosasaurs would have cruised through the water at a pretty leisurely pace, their whip-like tails (similar to those of eels or snakes) allowing for only brief bursts of speed to lunge at prey. But a 2013 study flipped what we know about mosasaur tails upside down, suggesting these aquatic predators had powerful, shark-like tails that would have allowed for high-speed hunting.
7. They ate EVERYTHING
Mosasaur fossils unearthed with other animal remains preserved where the stomach would have been have allowed scientists to conclude that these formidable hunters would have dined on fish, sharks, marine reptiles (including other mosasaurs), sea birds and any dinosaurs that got too close to the water.
8. They had countershading!
Thanks to a group of scientists led by Dr Johan Lindgren who discovered the pigment melanin in the fossilised scales of a mosasaur, scientists now think it's likely that these aquatic reptiles were light on their undersides and dark on top. This "countershading" is similar to what we see in sharks and whales, and is a handy form of marine camouflage.
9. They lived EVERYWHERE ... even in fresh water!
For a long time, experts believed mosasaurs lived only in marine environments. That's until scientists in Hungary collected over 100 bones of a new freshwater mosasaur species from a site that has produced no other marine or brackish-water animals or plants.
This new species was dubbed Pannoniasaurus inexpectatus, meaning "unexpected Hungary lizard". Mosasaur remains have been unearthed pretty much all over the globe – Europe, Asia, some parts of Africa, North America, South and Central America ... even some parts of Antarctica! They got around.
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Paleontology may be one of the coolest careers to break into, but it's far from the easiest.
As Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic writer Brian Switek laments, while some people develop other interests, quite a few "would-be" paleontologists simply didn't know where to start.
Luckily, Robert T. Bakker, author of "The Dinosaur Heresies,""Raptor Red," and "The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs," and curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Matthew T. Mossbrucker, director and curator of the Morrison Natural History Museum, and discoverer of the first baby Stegosaurus fossils, shed some light on how to get your start as a paleontologist during a recent Reddit AMA.
First, there are a few myths and misconceptions that need dispelling. The first is that paleontologists spend all their time digging for dinosaurs.
According to the University of California Museum of Paleontology website, "Paleontology is a rich field, imbued with a long and interesting past and an even more intriguing and hopeful future. Many people think paleontology is the study of fossils. In fact, paleontology is much more."
Paleontology is divided into various sub-disciplines including the study of microscopic fossils, fossil plants, invertebrate animal fossils, vertebrate fossils, and prehistoric human and proto-human fossils.
And as Bakker and Mossbrucker explain, there are many jobs you can hold within the paleontology field.
Bakker says most vertebrate paleontologists make a living teaching geology or anatomy. "A few lucky ones" get full time jobs working in a museum. Fossils are also a hot commodity right now, since scientists can use them to teach basic science literacy, so fossil-sleuth could be a lucrative route.
Generally, though, the pay isn't as much as you might hope.
"Doc [Bakker] always told me to 'marry money,'" Mossbrucker jokes. "Seriously though, this is a calling. Most of us live a monastic lifestyle, while some took his sage advice."
After all this, if pursuing a career in paleontology is still your calling, Bakker and Mossbrucker have a couple tips before you pursue the required higher education:
1. The best way to begin a career in dinosaurology is to start young. Bakker suggests studying living animals at a zoo or in your own backyard, filming them, and then using photo prints to sketch in the bones.
"Find the nearest display of fossils — whether at the natural history museum, science center, or state/national park — and visit," Mossbrucker suggests. "While visiting, take a guided tour. Ask questions. Then, slow down, put the phone away and bask in the glory of the old dead things. Read the labels. (Seriously, nobody reads the labels...) and soak it all in."
2. The next step is to volunteer, preferably in a program at your nearest natural history museum with a paleontology department. This will provide a chance to experience various aspects of what paleontology is all about and explore undergraduate programs.
"Get involved with your local museum and get your hands dirty," Mossbrucker says.
"In museums where I work — one huge, two small — volunteers are essential," Bakker says. "They find most of the specimens and do most of the tour-guide duties. In exceptional cases, volunteers are so good that we move heaven and earth to get a salary for them. And succeed."
"This life is a calling and I'm grateful for every moment of it," Mossbrucker says of his job as a paleontologist. "I'm surrounded by interesting objects, curious people, and a constant stream of weirdness."
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Dino-chicken. Chickosaurus. Squawkasaurus Rex. None of these sound quite as terrifying as the reptilian star in "Jurassic World," which set box-office records when it opened this past weekend. Dubbed Indominous rex, the behemoth is a fictitious chicken-based dinosaur that was created in a lab — an idea that is not so far-fetched, says a famed dinosaur hunter.
Why, of all things, a chicken? As it turns out, fossilized dinosaur DNA that is still viable has been impossible to find so far … and may not even exist. But the secret coding of dinosaurs is alive and well at your local Colonel Sanders.
"Chickens and all birds are carrying much bigger chunks of dinosaur DNA than we are ever likely to find in the fossil record," said James Horner, the inspiration for the original Jurassic Park's Alan Grant. [Image Gallery: The Life of T. Rex]
Horner shook up the paleontological establishment with his work on Maiasaura fossils in the 1980s, when he published a book detailing their communal behaviors. He has also championed the idea that Tyrannosaurus rexwas a scavenger, not a hunter.
More recently, in his lab at Montana State University, Horner has been experimenting with bird DNA alteration for more than a decade. And while he has been an adviser to the "Jurassic Park" franchise for years, Horner says that author Michael Crichton's original idea behind the park — the creation of dinosaurs from intact, fossilized DNA — is unlikely.
"DNA is an enormous molecule, made from trillions of pieces, held together in a cell nucleus by chemistry. As soon as the cell dies, that chemistry shuts down, and this molecule, which is very fragile, starts to come apart," Horner said.
It's a process that happens quickly, he added. "We don't think that there would be anything left after millions of years."
Indominous rex, the enormous killing machine at the center of "Jurassic World," is a far cry from what could be created in Horner's lab anytime soon, but that's OK with him. [6 Extinct Animals That Could Be Resurrected]
"It's all about form," he said. "Size is something we can work on at another time. But lots of dinosaurs were little.
Even making a poodle-size T. rex will not be easy, but he's working on it.
"The proof of concept has been accomplished," Horner said. "We can get teeth into a bird and just recently a team from Yale and Harvard have managed to retro-engineer [a bird's] beak back into a dinosaur-looking mouth. So we basically have the tail to reinstate, and to transform the wings back into an arm and hand."
In "Jurassic World,"velociraptors are trained for the entertainment of park patrons. The big, bad Indominous rex is portrayed as quite intelligent. And crafty. How likely is this to occur in a real-world breeding program?
"Regarding intelligence, we really don't understand it very well. We are very mammal-centric — that our way of thinking is the best way to do it. Yet we have absolutely no idea how other kinds of animals think or process information," Horner said. "With the Indominous rex, we've taken … the different characteristics from different animals and combined them together. Obviously, if you took some of the processing characteristics from other kinds of animals you would get a better thinker."
How far off might a little pet T. rex be? It's hard to say, according to Horner.
"We already make transgenic animals," he said. "We make glowfish, you can go get one at the pet store. That's a transgenic animal — a zebra fish that has had glow genes from jellyfish implanted into the embryo during development that makes it glow in the dark. We have that proof of concept, so we know we can make transgenic animals."
There are real-world benefits to this kind of research, beyond the "wow" factor. "Learning how to switch genes on and off and figuring out what different genes do will have tremendous application in medical fields and into many other areas as well, including making better food," Horner said. His research may also have applications in other areas, including treatment of spinal disorders.
Horner estimates the creation of a miniature dinosaur may be about 10 years off, though he admits that it is hard to predict.
"We might find a couple of these genes tomorrow or it might take 10 years," Horner said. "There is just no way to predict." Advancements in the field are typically not linear, which means progress can come in fits and starts as researchers piece together the genetic puzzle.
But the more people who are tackling the problem, the more quickly we could have our scaly, scary dino-chickens, he added. There are teams researching parts of the dino-GMO puzzle at McGill University, Harvard, Yale and others.
"It's becoming a global thing, which is good," Horner said. "I don't care if I'm the first person to come up with it … it doesn't matter to me who comes up with it."
He just wants his pet dinosaur.
Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.
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Jurassic World has made $1 billion in its first 13 days of release. Superficially, the film is an escapist tourism fantasy that devolves into a lurid nightmare of human-on-dinosaur and dinosaur-on-dinosaur combat.
But its real topic is boredom.
The film is about the rampage of an artificially engineered species of a hyper-intelligent super-dinosaur called the Indominus Rex, which crushes, gouges, and eats just about everything that crosses its path. We're told the Indominus came with a roughly $30 million price tag. But Jurassic World's exhibits have become stale and unexciting, with the park unable to stoke the enthusiasm of the general public without contriving newer, ever more violent dinosaurs into existence.
For the business and economics-minded, "Jurassic World," which exists (improbably) in the same universe as 1993's "Jurassic Park," poses a dizzying range of tantalizing and (SPOILER ALERT) unanswered questions.
Who in their right mind would insure a dinosaur park, particularly in light of the carnage at Jurassic Park some 20 years earlier? Are the park's employees unionized, and if so, what sort of insane provisions does the collective bargaining agreement for, say, the raptor wranglers include? What kind of mindboggling violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act did InGen have to commit in order to convince the Costa Rican government to let them build a second dinosaur park in the exact same location as the exact same company's earlier catastrophe of a dinosaur park? And how did something as complex as a dinosaur park operate without major incident for 20 years without a single competent employee?
But the most important question is that of how something like a real-world Jurassic World could ever lose its appeal. There's a possible business answer: the overhead for Jurassic World would make the cost of a visit prohibitively expensive. Dinosaur safaris might not reward repeat visits as much as we in a non-dinosaur park universe may assume — at least not at the consumer costs needed to keep the gates open.
Yet the Indominus Rex's business necessity is itself born of a spiritual void arguably endemic to capitalism itself. If "Jurassic Park" owes its ancestry to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, there's a straight line between "Jurassic World" and Max Weber, the early 20th century German thinker whose celebrated 1917 lecture "Science As A Vocation" is one of the source texts for an important sociological concept known as "disenchantment."
"Disenchantment" is the process through which empiricism replaces mysticism as an organizing and motivating principle for both individuals and society at large. For Weber, the rise of capitalism meant that the rigors of daily existence started to find meaning through earthly and numerable concerns, rather than through one's relation to an ineffable metaphysical power. In a sense, disenchantment is shorthand for the victory of the market over religion.
"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualizing and, above all, by the, 'disenchantment of the world,'" Weber wrote, borrowing a phrase from the 19th century poet Friedrich Schiller. "Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations."
In Weber's work, capitalism can be a liberating and enriching force, but it isn't a straithgforwardly positive one. Disenchantment deadens the imagination and spirit, and not just in the religious realm either.
"It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental," Weber writes – in sapping life of its divine mystery, disenchantment produces an insularity and alienation, depriving the pyramid or the temple or the cathedral spire of its power as a symbol of shared meaning. In the age of disenchantment, "If we attempt to force and to 'invent' a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years [Weber, it seemed, was not a fan of early modernist architecture]. If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects."
"Jurassic World" is about these very monstrosities. The film, and the park it depicts, are potent symbols of our own crisis of disenchantment.
Even children at the dinosaur park seem glued to their smartphones; at one point, a tourist clutching two giant margaritas ducks as a pterodon darts from overhead. In the world of the film, there's little doubt he finishes his drinks.
Zach, one of the two young nephews of the park's operation's manager, seems nonplussed by the prospect of riding a gyrocar through a herd of stegosauruses. Park management refers to the dinosaurs as "assets." The dinosaur scenes in "Jurassic Park" are imbued with wonder and awe:
In "Jurassic World," everyone down to the guy operating said gyrocar ride seems to have lost all perspective on how cool the place really is.
Almost no one in the movie — with the possible exception of Zach's brother Gray, who, let's be honest, is clearly too distraught by his parent's impending divorce to really care that much about the park, except as a kind of coping mechanism, which, fair — appear to be all that happy or excited to be there.
"Jurassic Park" is where dreams come alive; Jurassic World has a Brookstone and a Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville.
This is the movie about the moral, spiritual, and economic crisis of boredom at a dinosaur park. The crisis is not as far-fetched as it seems. We're in the era where the Louvre, repository of the some of the world's most sublime artistic accomplishments, isn't immune from the selfie stick plague. There are now classes dedicated to taking Instagram photos of food. Look at all these people with their smart-phones out as Nationals pitching demigod Max Scherzer closed in on a (tragically blown) perfect game on June 20th. Layers of distraction and disenchantment separate people from even the rarest and most spectacular of events, even when they're unfolding directly in front of them:
Psychic fracture and division are the markers of disenchantment, but there is an easy and highly lucrative way to exploit these phenomena, at least for a movie studio: The vast majority of the top-grossing films of 2014 were sequels or reboots. Same with 2013. Disenchantment hasn't eliminated the need for shared cultural touchstones. But disenchantment is so fragmenting and so corrosive to popular expectation that it's apparently removed the necessity to come up with new ones.
The movie is a kind of sly meta-joke about the traditional entertainment industry's finely-honed ability to shovel as much brand identification and fan service down audiences' throats as is humanly possible. The Indominus Rex — really just a larger, more violent version of "Jurassic Park's" T-Rex — embodies the soul-deadening, almost self-destructive character of an industry whose primary commercial readout seems to be monstrous retreads. It's a movie about the movies' failure to impress audiences, and those audience's enduring inability to be impressed by anything that's genuinely new.
There is delicious irony that a movie on this topic has now set a box office record and promises to spawn sequels of its own — and some hope in how it's created a rare common viewing experience, becoming something that might, for a few moments, pierce the general state of disenchantment that the movie critiques.
But there's more hope in the fact that it crossed the $1 billion mark just days after Pixar's "Inside-Out" scored the highest-grossing open of a non-sequel in cinematic history.
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Cal Orcko, located 3 miles south of downtown Sucre in Bolivia, is home to the world's largest and most diverse collection of dinosaur footprints from the Cretaceous Period.
The limestone cliff hosts about 5,000 dinosaur footprints, with many dating back 68 million years.
Discovered on the grounds of the local cement company Fancesa in 1985, the cliff was closed off to tourists after mining conditions and erosion began damaging the area.
After eight years of closures, tours started last year to allow visitors the opportunity to marvel at these footprints.
From the Parque Cretacico, which hosts a museum and dinosaur models, fossils, and paleontological information, you can take a one-hour guided tour to select areas of the wondrous paleontological site.
The tour starts in the Parque Cretacico, where you're given a helmet as a safety requirement from the cement factory before going to the south part of the cliff, which hosts footprints of Theropods (carnivorous dinosaurs).
Then you're taken through the cliff with your guide, who explains the history behind the Sauropod (long-neck herbivores) footprints you'll see. There are tracks from entire herds of Sauropods, ranging from 26 feet long to an impressive 65 feet.
You'll also get to peak at "under footprints," the oldest layer of prints, which date back 70 million years.
The site contains the footprints of at least eight different species and stands as an ever-changing record of history in the Cretaceous era.
As parts become eroded, new prints are continuously being found in the area, which is why the park has submitted Cal Orcko to the Unesco World Heritage list in an effort to continue preserving the footprints.
Guided tours are offered Monday through Saturday at noon and at 1 p.m. Tours cost $4.35.
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The American Museum of Natural History is one of the largest museums in the world. Tucked into its 1.6 million square feet of space are several secrets. Some you can see, some you cannot.
Produced by Kevin Reilly. Additional camera by Alex Kuzoian.
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The Nobel Prizes are given for the scientific breakthroughs that revolutionize their fields.
But some studies are more comical than revolutionary.
That's where the "Ig Nobel" Prizes come in. These awards recognize studies that make people giggle (and then take a second to think about their implications).
Here are the winners of the 25th annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which were announced Thursday night.
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Two groups of scientists achieved this dubious honor for studying the health benefits and consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate activities). Locking lips with a lover imparts more than passion, they found. Kissing also transferred millions of microbes, which made people less likely to have allergies — as well as a partner's DNA.
Chickens are a close relative to the T. Rex, which researchers thought made them a good option for studying how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth millions of years ago. So, scientists in Chile attached a wooden stick to the tails of chickens to see how the added weight might change how the animals walked. The birds with their centers of gravity shifted toward their rears walked in a similar way to how the researchers think two-legged dinosaurs like T. Rex may have walked.
Two brave souls allowed themselves to be stung by insects, for science. Researcher Justin Schmidt developed a pain index for how badly different insect stings hurt ranging from 0 (no pain) to 4 (excruciating pain). And scientist Michael Smith allowed bees to sting him on 25 different parts of his body to find the most painful (nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft) — yikes!
The 25th Ig Nobel Awards recognized some of the year's most bizarre, trivial or unusual discoveries in the fields of biology, economics, and mathematics. If you've ever wondered if a chicken can walk like a dinosaur, this Nobel Awards parody is for you.
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When we think about dinosaurs, we mostly imagine towering creatures pushing through jungle, surrounded by lush, tropical foliage.
But researchers looking further afield have discovered remains from these creatures further and further from the tropics and temperate zones, into the polar regions.
A new discovery shows that dinosaurs lived in environments so harsh they may have been very different creatures than we once thought.
On September 22, researchers working with the University of Alaska Museum of the North published a paper describing the discovery of a 30-foot-long duck-billed dinosaur that lived in the Arctic at the very top of Alaska, the furthest north of any known dinosaur species.
That a previously unknown unique species lived in a place with snowy, icy winters and four months without seeing the sun every year — the sort of environment we didn't know they could survive in — shows that the dinosaurs might have been tougher, hardier, and more diverse than we knew.
This new species is in the hadrosaur family and is named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, meaning "ancient grazer" in the language of the local Alaskan Native Iñupiaq culture.
"It had crests along its back like Godzilla," one of its discoverers, Florida State University biological sciences professor Gregory Erickson, told The New York Times.
Along with Godzilla-like crests and scales, scientists say that the dinosaur was approximately six or seven feet tall at the hip and could walk on all fours, despite the fact that its back legs were much longer than its front legs.
Its mouth was filled with hundreds of grinding teeth that would have helped it tear through coarse vegetation, which might have been all that was available in the Arctic winters. The press release notes that Erickson and co-discoverer Pat Druckenmiller previously have shown that the Alaskan Arctic was covered in a type of polar forest back in the Cretaceous Period, when this dinosaur would have roamed the land, approximately 69 million years ago.
It was warmer then than now, but winters would still have been snowy and mostly lifeless, and the Arctic would have been dark for months at a time in winter.
The bones of the Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensi came from an area known as the Liscomb Bone Bed along the Colville River. This area, in a region known as the North Slope of Alaska, is a tough place to reach. Researchers told the Times that a journey there involves a 500-mile drive from Fairbanks before they board a plane with "balloon tires." They have to navigate the area itself in rubber boats. But all that effort is worth it: The site is a treasure trove where bones from three species of dinosaur have been found.
While most of those fossil records are still incomplete, there are more than 6,000 bones from the newly discovered grazer, providing what the researchers describe as "multiple elements of every single bone in the body"— enough to describe a new dinosaur.
"The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur's physiology," Erickson said in the press release. "It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?"
The research was published in the international journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
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A study published in Science today finds new evidence that a meteorite impact wasn't the only thing that killed the dinosaurs.
Millions of years ago, a vast amount of lava erupted onto what is now India, spewing 12,275 cubic miles of lava onto the Earth's surface over the course of about 500,000 years.
New analysis of this ancient volcanic eruption (whose remains are now known as the Deccan Traps) shows that the eruption really accelerated within 50,000 years of the Chicxulub impact--a vast amount of time to humans, but a geological blink of an eye.
There has been a lot of work on the Deccan Traps in the geological community. Co-author Mark Richards and his colleagues have worked in the area for decades, and earlier this year, Richards published a paper suggesting that the impact of the giant Chicxulub meteorite shook the Earth so much that it helped trigger or accelerate the eruptions in India. The new, more precise dates show that it's unlikely that the timing of the impact and eruption was a coincidence.
"If our high-precision dates continue to pin these three events--the impact, the extinction and the major pulse of volcanism--closer and closer together, people are going to have to accept the likelihood of a connection among them. The scenario we are suggesting--that the impact triggered the volcanism--does in fact reconcile what had previously appeared to be an unimaginable coincidence," Richards said in a press release.
The authors think it's possible that while the meteorite impact delivered a knockout punch to Cretaceous life, the true death blow came later. During the eruption that formed the Deccan Traps, vast amount of climate changing gases spewed into the air for over half a million years, killing off a significant portion of life on Earth, and preventing species from rebounding after the effects of the impact (which also sprayed climate-changing dust and gases into the atmosphere).
Research from a 2011 paper by Princeton scientists came to a similar conclusion, finding that plankton fossils slowly shrank in size and number after the impact, with only a few of the once varied array of species surviving.
"Based on our dating of the lavas, we can be pretty certain that the volcanism and the impact occurred within 50,000 years of the extinction, so it becomes somewhat artificial to distinguish between them as killing mechanisms: both phenomena were clearly at work at the same time," lead researcher Paul Renne said in a press release. "It is going to be basically impossible to ascribe actual atmospheric effects to one or the other. They both happened at the same time."
The geological formations caused by the massive outpouring of lava onto the Earth's surface are called flood basalts, and geologists are still learning more about them. Though the Deccan Traps are the most famous, others, like the Ontong-Java Plateau in the Pacific are larger, covering an area the size of Alaska. The source of these massive eruptions is believed to come from deep inside the Earth's mantle--as deep as 1,800 miles, near the outer edge of the Earth's core.
This article originally appeared on Popular Science.
This article was written by Mary Beth Griggs from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
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The world had been wrecked. An asteroid impact in Mexico compounded by colossal volcanism in India 66 million years ago had killed about three-quarters of Earth's species including the dinosaurs.
But relatively soon afterward, a plucky critter that looked like a beaver was thriving, exemplifying the resilience of the mammals that would arise from the margins of the animal kingdom to become Earth's dominant land creatures.
Scientists on Monday announced the discovery in northwestern New Mexico's badlands of the fossil remains of Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, a plant-eating, rodent-like mammal boasting buck-toothed incisors like a beaver that lived just a few hundred thousand years after the mass extinction, a blink of the eye in geological time.
Kimbetopsalis, estimated at 3 feet long (1 meter), would have been covered in fur and possessed large molar teeth with rows of cusps used to grind down plants.
Asked what someone's impression of Kimbetopsalis might be, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science curator of paleontology Thomas Williamson said, "They would probably think something like, 'Hey, look at that little beaver! Why doesn’t it have a flat tail?"
It lived in a lush area of forests, rivers, streams and lakes as Earth's ecosystems began to recover from the catastrophe that ended the Cretaceous Period and opened the Paleocene Epoch.
"It's larger than almost all of the mammals that lived with the dinosaurs, and also had a plant-eating diet, which few if any dinosaur-living mammals had. It shows just how quickly mammals were evolving in that brave new world after the asteroid cleared out the dinosaurs," said paleontologist Steve Brusatte of Scotland's University of Edinburgh.
"Mammals, which actually originated hundreds of millions of years earlier at the same time as the dinosaurs, now found themselves in an empty world, and they took advantage," Brusatte added.
Kimbetopsalis was a member of a mammalian group called multituberculates that resembled rodents although they were not closely related. Although now extinct, disappearing about 35 million years ago, multituberculates were extremely successful, having lived for 120 million years.
"Mammals survived the mass extinction, but they did not pass through unscathed," Williamson said. "I think it would be better to describe those survivors as being lucky. A few just happened to have been adapted to survive the catastrophe, probably because they were small, could hide in burrows and eat bugs."
The research was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
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A newly discovered exoplanet has a lot of astronomers excited, and for good reason.
The exoplanet, dubbed GJ 1132b, is about the size of Earth and lives in a solar system roughly 39 light-years from Earth, a team of scientists reported in the November 12, 2015, issue of the journal Nature.
Furthermore, the exoplanet is the closest rocky Earth-sized exoplanet ever discovered, by far.
The next closest is about three times farther away.
GJ 1132b's size and distance are what have astronomers like Drake Deming at the University of Maryland — who was not part of the study — saying that this planet is "arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system," he told The Guardian.
The reason is because GJ 1132b is close enough for astronomers to point their telescopes at it and sniff out any traces of an atmosphere.
Studying the atmospheres of exoplanets for signs of life is the next big step in the search for extraterrestrial life beyond our solar system.
But it's an extremely difficult project because most Earth-sized planets — the exoplanets that astrobiologists think are most likely to harbor life — are too distant to study in any detail.
One of the ways astronomers determine the chemical composition of gases on planets in our own solar system is by studying the light passing through their atmospheric layers, like Earth's shown in the photo below with our crescent moon in the foreground:
Chemical compounds and molecules interact differently with different energies of light, and, as a result, each molecule leaves a unique fingerprint that scientists can see when they map out the light over what is called a spectrum.
But when an object is hundreds of light-years away, it's nearly impossible to differentiate the light that's passing through an exoplanet's atmosphere from the light that's emanating from the larger, brighter host star.
Now, GJ 1132b has changed that, offering astronomers a perfect specimen to test their instruments and methods for detecting life.
"It's nearby, it's Earth-like, and its star won't interfere," Deming told The Guardian.
This newly discovered exoplanet is, however, just a stepping stone.
The possibility of finding life on it is practically zero. GJ 1132b might be only 16% larger than Earth, but it's surface temperature is a balmy 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth, but along the way we've found a twin Venus," David Charbonneau, a co-author on the new paper and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a press release. "We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere, too, and if it does we can't wait to get a whiff."
The reason for these toasty temperatures is because GJ 1132b sits just 1.4 million miles from its host star — 26 times closer than Mercury is to our sun.
It takes just 1.6 days for GJ 1132b to complete a single orbit around its star, which is very different from our sun.
The star is what is called a red dwarf, which astronomers suspect is the most common star throughout our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
Red-dwarf stars are cooler, smaller, and dimmer than our sun. The one that GJ 1132b is orbiting is about one-fifth the size of our sun and only emits about 1/200th the amount of light.
Here's a diagram comparing, to scale, the size of our sun with a red dwarf (second from the left) and Jupiter (far right):
Just because they're different from our sun, however, doesn't mean life couldn't spawn around them. It just means that the habitable zone — the region in space where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface — is closer to the star than it is for our sun.
Some astronomers estimate that red-dwarf stars comprise 75% of all stars in the galaxy. This means that most of the exoplanets in our galaxy are likely orbiting red-dwarfs.
Whether any of those planets are habitable, however, is a subject of intense debate, which is why the discovery of GJ 1132b is so exciting. And while GJ 1132b is not likely habitable, it's possible that it has some neighbors that are.
To first spot GJ 1132b as it passed in front of the star, the researchers used the MEarth-South array, a group of telescopes at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Now that they know it's there, the team has requested time on the Hubble Space Telescope (which observes the same type of light we see with our eyes) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (which observes longer wavelengths than Hubble, in the infrared regime) to study GJ 1132b more fully.
With the viewing powers of Hubble and Spitzer combined, the scientists could get a much broader spectrum of light to study even more chemical compounds than they otherwise would with just one of the telescopes.
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Where do we come from? There are many right answers to this question, and the one you get often depends on who you ask.
For example, an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the nuclear fires of stars.
On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates' and conclude we evolved from apes.
Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has a different, and novel answer, which she describes in her latest book, "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs."
Randall has written other popular science books, including the New York Times bestseller "Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions." Her studies at Harvard explore theoretical particle physics and cosmology.
In her latest book, she posits that the extinction of the dinosaurs — necessary for the emergence of humans — is linked to dark matter. Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible matter that astronomers estimate makes up 85% of all matter in our universe.
Paleontologists largely agree that about 66 million years ago a giant, 9-mile-long celestial body — likely a comet — struck Earth. The impact wiped out 75% of species across the planet, including most of the dinosaurs.
Among the survivors were small primates. Over the next 66 million years these primates diversified, grew larger, learned to walk on two legs, and developed large brains, which they eventually used to invent pizza delivery.
So what caused that giant space rock to collide with our planet in the first place and give primates a chance to thrive?
It could just be chance — or luck, depending on your perspective — but Randall would disagree with both of these ideas.
In her book, Randall describes a dark, pancake-shaped patty of densely packed dark matter within our galaxy that could be responsible for our emergence as a species.
Dark matter has never been directly detected. However, there is enough evidence for its immense gravitational influence on our universe that the vast majority of the scientific community agrees that dark matter is a form of mysterious matter that we can neither see or touch, but that nevertheless must permeate the cosmos.
Generally, dark matter tends to be concentrated in large halos around galaxies like giant bubbles. But Randall thinks that there could also be a so-called dark disc amid the stars, planets, and gas clouds in our galaxy.
If there is dark matter in Randall's hypothetical disc, then it stands to reason that the disc has a powerful gravitational influence on the objects around it — including our solar system.
But our solar system is not always near the disc, which is the crux of Randall's theory.
As the solar system revolves around the center of the Milky Way — the same way Earth revolves around the sun — it moves up and down, or oscillates, through the plane of our galaxy. And the rate of this oscillation is very intriguing.
Below is an illustration of our solar system's oscillation, where the orange dot in the lower left rectangle is our sun and the black line at the center is the dark disc:
A team of astronomers made a rough estimate of this oscillation rate near the turn of this century, calculating that our solar system passes through the plane of the Milky Way about once every 32 million years, which means if there's a dark disc, we pass through that at the same rate.
Interestingly, there's evidence to suggest that mass extinctions in Earth's past happened within this time frame, or about once every 25 to 35 million years.
It's this similarity between the mass-extinction rate and the rate of our solar system's oscillation through the galaxy that made Randall and her Harvard colleague Matthew Reece first suggest the link in a scientific paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters last year, and that Randall explores more in her book.
Randall hypothesizes that when we're passing through the dark disc, the gravity from the dark matter within influences the outer region of our solar system, called the Oort cloud.
The Oort cloud, illustrated below just right of center, sits between roughly 1,000 to 100,000 Astronomical Units (90 billion to 9 trillion miles) from the sun and is thought to contain billions of icy objects at least 12 miles wide.
If something 12 miles wide hit Earth today, it would mean the end of life as we know it. And Randall thinks that's exactly what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago that opened the door for widespread primate evolution.
While it's impossible to wind back the clock, proving the existence of the dark disc would greatly advance Randall's theory.
She's tried to do so by looking at the speed and direction of stars in our galaxy. If stars moved in ways that couldn't be explained by the amount of ordinary, visible matter around them, then it could suggest the presence of the dark disc.
But that's a very tall order. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and hunting dark matter is notoriously tricky.
We have a dozen or so functioning detectors underground, on Earth's surface, and in space — and none of them has yet managed to sniff out a dark-matter particle. If they do, it would be a significant step toward supporting Randall's hypothesis.
In her concluding remarks, Randall writes:
"In some global sense, we are all descendants of Chicxulub [the town where the dinosaur-killing meteor impacted]. It's a part of our history that we should want to understand. If true, the additional wrinkle presented in this book would mean that not only was dark matter responsible for irrevocably changing our world, but also that some of it played a crucial role in allowing our existence."
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NOW WATCH: A Harvard physicist has an incredible theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct
Harvard Physicist Lisa Randall explains how Earth could be in the middle of the 6th mass extinction due to human activity.
Randall has authored several books, including the recent "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs."
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WASHINGTON - On a platform of rock jutting into the Atlantic on Scotland's Isle of Skye, hundreds of newly discovered dinosaur tracks are changing the way scientists view the lifestyle of some of the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth.
Scientists on Tuesday said they found the vast collection of Jurassic Period footprints, some reaching 28 inches (70 cm) in diameter, made when dinosaurs called sauropods waded through shallow water in a brackish lagoon 170 million years ago.
"There were clearly lots of sauropods moving all around this lagoon. They were at home there, they were thriving there. Looking at the chaotic jumble of tracks, it looks like a dance floor, like a dinosaur disco," University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte said.
Sauropods were four-legged plant-eaters with long necks, long tails, pillar-like legs and immense bodies. It is uncertain what species made the Isle of Skye tracks, but Brusatte estimates these dinosaurs were 50 feet (15 meters) long and weighed 15-20 tons.
Sauropods as a group included the planet's biggest terrestrial animals ever. The Isle of Skye sauropods were relatively primitive, perhaps "an early cousin or ancestor of the famous ones like Diplodocus and Brontosaurus," Brusatte said.
Brusatte said many decades ago scientists thought sauropods must have lived in swamps because such behemoths could never support their weight on land, but that idea was discarded in the 1970s with the realization they were well-adapted for living on land as shown by their skeletal structure.
This fossil footprint site and other recent finds show these dinosaurs really did spend at least some time in the water, Brusatte said. These sauropods were not swimmers or pure water-dwellers, probably living mostly on land but still spending considerable time in the water, he said.
"Maybe these lagoons were a ready source of food, or offered protection from predators. But regardless of the answer, this discovery and the other recent ones are inspiring us to re-imagine the lifestyles of these most incredible of ancient creatures," Brusatte said.
Few fossils are known from this age, the middle of the Jurassic, University of Edinburgh paleontologist Tom Challands said.
The site boasts at least three layers of sandstone and limestone with trackways, demonstrating sauropods flourished in lagoon environments over multiple generations. The main layer, with numerous trackways crisscrossing one another, measures about 50 by 80 feet (15 by 25 meters).
The research was published in the Scottish Journal of Geology.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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NOW WATCH: A Harvard physicist has an incredible theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct
It sounds like a scene from the next "National Treasure" movie, but, in fact, Nicolas Cage is returning a stolen dinosaur skull in real life.
According to Reuters, the actor has agreed to turn over a rare Tyrannosaurus bataar skull to US authorities. The skull will be repatriated to Mongolia.
Cage bought the item for $276,000 in 2007 at a Beverly Hills gallery, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio.
A US attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, filed a civil forfeiture complaint last week. The lawsuit did not specifically name Cage as the owner, though, according to the actor's publicist, Cage has agreed to hand it over to authorities. The Department of Homeland Security notified him in July 2014 that the fossil might be stolen.
Neither Cage nor the I.M. Chait gallery, where the actor bought the skull, has been accused of any wrongdoing.
The Tyrannosaurus bataar skull is roughly 67 million years old. Since 2012, Bharara's office has recovered more than a dozen Mongolian fossils, including three full Tyrannosaurus bataar skeletons.
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Most of us imagine dinosaurs as the huge, towering prehistoric beings that once walked the Earth. But it turns out that dinosaurs were actually a wide range of sizes— and some of them weren't much larger than a turkey. Here's how big all the dinosaurs from "Jurassic Park" are relative to an average human man.
Produced by Monica Manalo. Graphics by Skye Gould. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.
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A dinosaur youngling belonging to the same group of beasts as Triceratops has been described in detail in the Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology. This ancient juvenile, which lived at the twilight of the age of the dinosaurs, will help to fill in several key evolutionary gaps that paleontologists have been puzzling over for some time.
The Ceratopsidae are one of the more immediately recognizable groups of dinosaurs.
Characterized by sharp beaks and flamboyant horns and frills, these herbivores almost all lived in what is now Western North America right at the end of the Cretaceous period, 100 to 66 million years ago.
Chasmosaurus belonged to this group, and this new discovery represents an exciting moment for the research team, led by Prof. Philip Currie from the University of Alberta. “For the first time ever, we have a complete skeleton of a baby ceratopsid,” Currie said in a statement. Only its forelimbs are completely missing.
The 75 million-year-old fossilized Chasmosaurus was spotted in 2010 within the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada. In 2013, paleontologists completely unearthed it, and this week, they have described what is undoubtedly a rare specimen.
The adult variants are certainly distinctive, with large openings in their head ornaments earning them their appropriate name, which literally means “opening lizard.” Fully grown, they reach a size of up to 4.8 meters (16 feet) and a weight of roughly 2 tonnes (2.2 tons).
This juvenile Chasmosaurus is an adorable 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) in length, and would have weighed less than 100 kilograms (220 pounds). It’s so young that its vertebrae had not properly fused, its limbs were not fully articulated (joined up), and it had a particularly short snout. Due to its ornamental opening being fully enclosed by a single bone, scientists have deduced it is likely a species called Chasmosaurus belli.
Not only was its ornamental frill predictably smaller than that of an adult, but it was also a different shape. The back isn’t broad and squared off as would be expected, and also narrows towards the back.
Just by having a juvenile Chasmosaurus, paleontologists will be able to track how the species grows over time as it matures into an adult. “We've only had a few isolated bones before to give us an idea of what these animals should look like as youngsters, but we've never had anything to connect all the pieces. All you need is one specimen that ties them all together. Now we have it!”
One major mystery remains, however: What was the purpose of the frill? Paleontologists note that the large opening would have made it rather useless in combat, so it may have been that it was used to regulate its body temperature, or that it was perhaps part of a sexual selection behavior designed to attract a mate.
Sadly, this 3-year-old dinosaur may have met an unfortunate end, probably drowning during a failed river rescue. Thankfully, paleontologists have, in a manner of speaking, brought it to life.
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NOW WATCH: A Harvard physicist has an incredible theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct
You can find all kinds of things on a beach. Lost sunglasses, loose change, seashells, the fossilized remains of a dinosaur. You know, the usual.
In 2014, fossil hunters found the remains of a dinosaur on a rocky Welsh beach after a storm. They turned the fossil over to National Museum Cardiff, where researchers from the museum and UK universities identified it as a theropod, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.
In a paper published this week in PLOS One, researchers announced that further work on the fossil led them to conclude that this dinosaur, named Dracoraptor hanigani, lived 200 million years ago and was one of the earliest dinosaurs of the Jurassic period. It's also the first Jurassic-era dinosaur skeleton found in the UK.
Why is it exciting that the dinosaur is 200 million years old? There are certainly other, older fossils of dinosaurs out there, dating back into the Triassic period 240 million years ago. But this new dinosaur fossil lived right on the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic, a line in time that paleontologists are still trying to learn more about.
See, dinosaurs lived during a geologic era called the Mesozoic, which lasted from 250 million years ago to around 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct. The Mesozoic is broken into three periods: the Triassic (250 million to 199.6 million years ago), the Jurassic (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago), and the Cretaceous (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago). The divisions between these periods are marked by changes in lifeforms and climate, most notably extinctions.
Early dinosaurs evolved in the Triassic, but they didn't come into their own until the Jurassic, after a huge extinction event that wiped out massive amounts of marine creatures. The cause of the extinction remains unknown, but researchers are always eager to know more about the lifeforms that did manage to survive, or evolved right after an event like this.
Researchers already know a lot about Dracoraptor hanigani. It was a small dinosaur, just 2.3 feet tall, and 6.5 feet long (including its long tail). With bones that were still growing it was possibly a juvenile, and likely was warm-blooded with feathers.
"The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event is often credited for the later success of dinosaurs through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but previously we knew very little about dinosaurs at the start of this diversification and rise to dominance," said co-author Steven Vidovic. "Now we have Dracoraptor, a relatively complete two meter long juvenile theropod from the very earliest days of the Jurassic in Wales."
This article originally appeared on Popular Science
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NOW WATCH: A Harvard physicist explains why we could be in the middle of the sixth mass extinction
