Rareresource

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Scientists decipher dinosaur colouration

Scientists have lastly answered the question that has befuddled the mind of nearly every inquisitive dinosaur enthusiast who's wondered, what colour were they?

While Hollywood has frequently provided its artistic interpretation for what the primitive creatures may have looked like in films like Jurassic Park, scientists now believe that they have enough evidence to definitively describe the colour patterns of convinced dinosaurs.

The discoveries, lately published in the academic journal Science and featured in National Geographic, were credited to a team led by Li Quanguo of the Beijing Museum of usual History and Jakob Vinther of Yale University.

The scientists were capable to extrapolate information about the density of melanosomes within fossilized dinosaurs with protofeathers and compare them to alike structures in modern birds to produce lifelike images of Anchiornis huxleyi. This little dinosaur much more closely resembles modern birds than it does stereotypical dinosaurs, but the impact of these findings remain innovative nonetheless.

Many researchers have been racing to rebuild the accurate image of dinosaurs; a similar study was lately published in a January issue of Nature. That article featured artwork by Lida Xing, a master's student studying paleontology at the University of Alberta. Xing contributed a picture of sinosaurepteryx, a carnivorous turkey-sized dinosaur, that he had constructed based on the findings.

Usually speaking, I would study the fossil cautiously, and communicated with the paper author regularly to understand the major features of the dinosaur. For example, sinosauropteryx with orange- and white-striped tails might be used for exhibit. This is the hint I'd got, he said.

When asked what inspired both his artistic originality and his scientific passion, Xing recalled a jiffy from his childhood.

My mother interpret to me Chinese Dinosaur, a book written by Dr. Dong Zhiming. It was then that the idea of becoming a paleontologist got determinedly planted in my head he recalled.

Many years afterward Xing was capable to join Zhiming on dinosaur excavations in Yunan and Henan provinces of China. afterward he worked at the Institute of Vertabrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences where he began work on artistic reproductions of dinosaurs, counting a cover illustration for Nature in 2006.

Labels: dinosaur age, Dinosaur fossil pictures, Dinosaur fossils, Dinosaur unit

Monday, February 22, 2010

Primitive island 'Jurassic Parkette' ruled by dwarf dinosaurs found

London, Feb 21 (ANI): Paleontologists have discovered a primitive lost world which was ruled by miniature dinosaurs

Sort of a pigmy Jurassic Park, the island was the homeland of dinos who were up to eight times lesser than some of their mainland cousins, reports The Telegraph.

Dwarf dinosaurs' fossils were establish in what is now modern day Romania, in an area known as Hateg, which, 65 million years before - when the creatures were living there - was an island, reports The Telegraph.

One of the fossils was of Magyarosaurus, which was small bigger than a horse, but was related to some of the biggest creatures to ever walk the Earth - gigantic titanosaurs such as Argentinosaurus, which reached up to 100 feet long and weighed approximately 80 tons.

Professor Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol, who carried out the delve into with scientists at the Universities of Bucharest and Bonn, said: Most of the well-known dinosaurs that we know about were living on big landmasses at the end of the Cretaceous age.

The inquisitive thing about Europe at this time was that it was largely covered by sea and much of Eastern Europe was a type of archipelago of islands.

If you are a big dinosaur on a little island with limited food and space, then the evolutionary pressure is either to go extinct or to get lesser.

The findings will be published in the scientific periodical Palaeogreography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. (ANI)

Labels: dinosaur age, dinosaur history, dinosaurs family, Dinosaurs world

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Dinosaur had ginger feathers

A team of scientists from China and the UK has currently revealed that the bristles of this 125 million-year-old Dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers.

The researchers say that the very small carnivore had a Mohican of feathers running along its head and back. It also had a stripy tail.

The team revealed details of the Dinosaur's colored feathers in an article published on Nature's website.

The team began by studying the fossilised ruins of a bird, Confuciusornis, which also lived during the premature cretaceous period.

Confuciusornis' featherswere preserved in very complete Fossils that were lately discovered in northern China.

Using a powerful electron microscope to look in the interior feathers, researchers were capable to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, include the pigment melanin.

Melanin is what gives color to human hair and animal pelt, said Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, who led this study. They are also the most general way that colors are [produced] in feathers.

Professor Benton explained that differently shaped melanosomes produced dissimilar colors, with blacks or greys produced by sausage-shaped melanosomes, and reddish or russet shades found in globular ones.

Labels: dinosaur age, Dinosaur fossils, dinosaur history

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Blast from the past

DANVILLE â€” Local dentist Dr. John Jack Hankla is delighted as schoolchildren file into the grand hall of the Community Arts Center and marvel at the hefty collection of replica dinosaur skeletons.

I just enjoy seeing the children 'ooh' and aah, Hankla said. When they first come in through the door and they see the splendor of these specimens, and they say Wow! I understand that we have done our job.

That Wow! factor, as Hankla calls it, fueled the curiosity that he and his son, John, shared to obtain the collection over the last 20 years.

The collection which includes a 40-foot Tyrannosaurus rex does not include innovative fossils. Rather, the specimens in the display are cast replicas of the bones. The ground floor has completely assembled skeletons, while an upstairs room has skulls and feet.

The inventive fossils were found in China, Brazil, Germany, North Africa and elsewhere around the world. The skull of a duck-billed dinosaur was found on a site close to Lusk, Wyo., where the Hanklas one time owned the fossil rights for digging specimens.

It was at that site that Jack and John Hankla first got eager about dinosaurs when John was about 8 years old. Hundreds of duck-billed dinosaurs had drowned there in a few sort of water hazard.

They were all washed into one smooth lagoon, Jack Hankla said. The carnivores then came and feasted on all these carcasses, and it was nicknamed the T. rex CafÃ©, because we discover all these broken teeth of carnivores like T. rex and raptors and lesser dromeosaurs, where they had been there munching.

Labels: dinosaur age, Dinosaur bones, Dinosaur fossils, dinosaur history, Dinosaur unit

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Model Dinosaur Tests Four-Winged Flight

A hand-built model of an early flying dinosaur may explain precisely how the four wings of Microraptor gui helped it glide down from trees.

Basing their work on a cast of a very fresh-looking fossil, University of Kansas scientists created a model airplane-like mock dinosaur made out of plywood, balsa, and carbon fiber. Then, they attached one of three sets of test wings of dissimilar configurations to the body with rubber bands. The wings even featured real bird feathers whittled into likely shapes.

We went rear and forth. We thought, maybe weâ€™ll do 3-D graphics and itâ€™ll look actually cool. But itâ€™s more precise to do the modeling directly from the specimen, said Dave Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas and co-author of a new paper on the work in the actions of the National Academies of Sciences.

Microraptor gui was a little dinosaur species that lived about 120 million years ago. About two dozen specimens have been recovered from close to Liaoning, China. The Kansas team was lent one well-preserved fossil, from which they began their rebuilding efforts.

With the model in hand, they were capable to test how the animals might have glided, by attaching them to a catapult that imparted a reliable amount of thrust to send them flying through the air. By measuring the distances that the dissimilar wing configurations allowed the model dinosaurs to fly, they were able to determine which wing type would have been most competent.

The biomechanical reconstruction of flying creatures not seen today is a tricky business. Burnham and his collaborator, University of Kansas paleontologist David Alexander, argue that the birds most likely glided with their legs splayed out â€” not unlike a flying squirrel.

Others argue for a dissimilar wing configuration, in which both sets of wings are parallel to each other, what they call a biplane configuration. Sankar Chatterjee, a paleontologist at Texas Tech, and R. Jack Templin, an independent scholar, say that as an alternative of splaying out like a squirrel, the animal would have tucked its legs below itself.

Labels: dinosaur age, Dinosaur animals, dinosaur history, Dinosaurs world

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Main menus

Dino Gallery

Dinosaur news