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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Tiny dinos died after falling into 160-mln-yr-old deep footprints of larger beasts

The exceptional Fossil haul of feathered dinosaurs in a 160-million-year-old marsh in China proposes that they perished after falling into the deep muddy footprints of larger beasts.

According to a report in New Scientist, David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, established partial skeletons of 18 small two-legged Dinosaurs in the 160-million-year-old sediments.

They were stacked on top of each other, apparently after becoming trapped about circular swampy pits.

The pits enclose distinctive red fragments of crust mixed into the mud.

The palaeontologists reckon this is the effect of large, heavy sauropod feet breaking through a crusty surface layer to watery mud beneath.

A thin crust would have formed hiding the trap from an unsuspecting tiny dinosaur but unable support its weight.

The thin crust would have buried the trap from an unsuspecting small dinosaur.

Fifteen of the fossils were Limusaurus inextricabilis, an odd bipedal dinosaur with tiny arms and a beak.

Even though it belonged to a group of predators it appears to have eaten plants.

"The victims were less than 1 meter tall and 1 to 3 meters long, so they would have been too short to drive against the bottom, which was 1 or 2 meters beneath the surface of the watery mud," said Eberth.

Their arms would have been enveloped with mud-slicked feathers and too small to pull them out of the hole.

"Finding any fossil remains like these, whose presence depends on the activities of other dinosaurs is bizarre." Eberth said.

Labels: Dinosaur eggs, Dinosaur image, Dinosaur model, Dinosaur photo, Dinosaur skeleton

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Meet "Antonio"- A New Italian Dinosaur

According to Fabio M. Dalla Vecchia, who precede the project, Antonio is noteworthy on many counts. Dalla Vecchia, a researcher at both the the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Institut Català de Paleontologia told Discovery News that this dinosaur:

• is only the 2nd ever dinosaur species named in Italy
• is the most complete medium to large sized dinosaur ever originate in Europe
• might be one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons in the world
• be evidence for the first time what close relatives to duck-billed dinosaurs looked like in detail

Tethyshodros insularis imply "island dweller hadrosaurid dinosaur of Tethys."

Tethys was an ocean that splited Africa from the Euro-Asia continent during
dinosaur times. The new dinosaur species survived on a small island in the western part of this ocean 70 million years ago. Dalla Vecchia utters that this was an unusual spot for such an animal, comparable to an elephant being found in the Bahamas today.

Labels: Dinosaur eggs, Dinosaur photo, Dinosaur skeleton, Dinosaur teeth

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Dinosaurs on steroids: The Copenhagen conclusion

The global financial disaster and the threats of climate change are symptoms of the same cause.

That cause is the dinosaur-like structure of economies that grew out of the Industrial Revolution and evaded the cost of fixing heavy pollution of smokestack industries by exporting them around the globe to others keen to get rich too.
The mirrors and smoke model that makes money and pretends waste disappears has now turned full circle, and come up against itself at the Copenhagen climate change conference.
The enduring meeting of 192 parties will be the first time all nations, side-by-side, have had to face the truth that there is nowhere left to pollute - and nowhere else to borrow from.

Until now science has seemed esoteric compared to the pragmatism and rationality of the market. Every time a new disaster occurred, the same mantra was chanted: "markets will adjust".

Well, the markets adjusted dreadfully in September last year, and economists' solution for the US is to print 8 billion $100-paper bills.
Climate change can be a more disastrous market adjustment. Catastrophic geographic situations cannot be papered over with money. That financial accounting has become unhinged from the real economy is already obvious

Labels: Dinosaur eggs, Dinosaur image, Dinosaur model, Dinosaur skeleton

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

New Evidence Suggests An Asteroid Couldn't Have Killed The Dinosaurs

Princeton geoscientist Gerta Keller has new proof to support her alternative theory that volcanoes, not meteorites, wiped out the dinosaurs. Indeed, the evidence is so convincing that we might be dropping the whole "alternative" part.

Keller is one of several co-authors on a new paper in The Journal of the Geological Society of London that lays out the startling innovative evidence. prior studies of rock formations in India, Mexico, and the United States had first prompted Keller to conclude there was a discernible period between the massive meteorite impact that has been advanced as the killer of the dinosaurs, and their actual final extinction.

This extinction, which is known to have occurred 65 million years back, marked one of the most drastic biological upheavals this planet has ever seen. Signaling the last part of the age of reptiles (the Mesozoic Era) and the beginning of the age of mammals (the Cenozoic Era), this limit between the Cretaceous (abbreviated "K") and Tertiary ("T") periods is known in scientific literature as the K-T Boundary. The K-T Boundary can be observed geologically through the vastly different plant and animal species found on each side of the divide.

Labels: Dinosaur eggs, Dinosaur image, Dinosaur model, Dinosaur skeleton

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