Palaeontology
edyong | September 17, 2009
Meet Raptorex, the "king of thieves". It's a new species of dinosaur that looks, for all intents and purposes¸ like the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with large, powerful skull and tiny, comical forearms. But there's one very important difference - it's 100 times smaller. Unlike the ever-shrinking world of music players and phones, it seems that evolution crafted tyrannosaur technology with much smaller specifications before enlarging the design into the giant predators of the late Cretaceous.
Raptorex is a new species of meat-eating dinosaur, discovered in northwest China by Paul…
edyong | September 16, 2009
For humans and most other mammals, sex is a question is chromosomes. Two X chromsomes makes us female while an X and a Y makes us male. Birds use a similar but reversed system, where males are ZZ and females are ZW. But for reptiles, including crocodiles, turtles and many lizards, sex is determined not by genes, but by temperature.
In crocodiles, males hatch from eggs incubated at cooler temperatures while warmer conditions produce females. In turtles, it's the other way around, and lizards use a variety of criteria including some very complicated combinations of genes, temperature and…
edyong | September 12, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
In Jurassic Park, the role of Velociraptor was played by computer-generated reptilian actors, that bore little resemblance to the real deal. The actual dinosaur was smaller, slower and used its infamous claw to stab (or possibly climb) rather than disembowel. And in 2007, scientists found good evidence that it was covered in feathers.
Since Jurassic Park aired, dinosaurs like Velociraptor have received something of a makeover. It began in the late 1990s when Chinese palaeontologists found a…
edyong | August 26, 2009When sportsmen use rackets or bats, their best bet is to hit a ball on the "sweet spot", the point where various forces balance out to deliver powerful blows with only very small forces on the wielder's wrist. Engineers have the right tools and models to work out where this spot lies on their instruments. Now, palaeontologists have used the same techniques to study biological hammers that adorn the tails of giant prehistoric armadillos called glyptodonts.
At first glance, glyptodonts have little in common with the likes of Andy Murray and Roger Federer. These armoured beasts lived in the…
edyong | August 18, 2009Several million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, a flying reptile - a pterosaur - came in for a landing. As it approached, it used its powerful wings to slow itself down and hit the ground feet first. It took a short hopping step before landing a second time. On solid ground, it leant forward, put its arms down and walked away on all fours.
The landing made quite an impression on the underlying limestone mud and in the following millennia, the creature's tracks became fossilised. Now, they have been unearthed by Jean-Michel Mazin from the University of Lyon at a site…
edyong | June 21, 2009
There is a reason why there are no dinosaur geneticists - their careers would quickly become as extinct as the 'terrible lizards' themselves. Bones may fossilise, but soft tissues and molecules like DNA do not. Outside of the fictional world of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have left no genetic traces for eager scientists to study.
Nonetheless, that is exactly what Chris Organ and Scott Edwards from Harvard University have managed to do. And it all started with a simple riddle: which came first, the chicken or the genome?
Like almost all birds, a chicken's genome - its full complement of DNA…
edyong | May 31, 2009
Six million years ago, the skies of Argentina were home to fearsome predator - Argentavis magnificens, the largest bird to ever take to the air. It weighed in at 70kg and had a wingspan of 7m, about the same size as a Cessna 152 light aircraft.
Argentavis was a member of an extinct group of predatory birds understandably called the teratorns - 'monster birds'. They are related to storks and New World vultures such as turkey vultures and condors. But Argentavis completely dwarfed even the massive Andean condor, weighing six times more and with a wingspan over twice as long (in the picture…
edyong | May 3, 2009
Being confronted with a pack of wolves is bad enough, but if you happened to be in Alaska some 12,000 years ago, things would be much, much worse. Back then, the icy forests were patrolled by a sort of super-wolf. Larger and stronger than the modern gray wolf, this beast had bigger teeth and more powerful jaws, built to kill very large prey.
This uber-wolf was discovered by Jennifer Leonard and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles. The group were studying the remains of ancient gray wolves, frozen in permafrost in eastern Beringia, a region that includes Alaska and…
edyong | April 30, 2009These cells look like fairly typical bone cells. They appear to be connected to each other by thin branch-like projections and are embedded in a white matrix of fibres. At their centres are dark red spots that are probably their nuclei. But it's not their appearance that singles out these extraordinary cells - it's their source. You're looking at the bone cells of a dinosaur.
They come from an animal called Brachylophosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived over 80 million years ago. By looking at one of its thigh bones, Mary Schweitzer from North Carolina State University has managed to…
edyong | March 30, 2009
For all appearances, this looks like the skull of any human child. But there are two very special things about it. The first is that its owner was clearly deformed; its asymmetrical skull is a sign of a medical condition called craniosynostosis that's associated with mental retardation. The second is that the skull is about half a million years old. It belonged to a child who lived in the Middle Pleistocene period.
The skull was uncovered in Atapuerca, Spain by Ana Gracia, who has named it Cranium 14. It's a small specimen but it contains enough evidence to suggest that the deformity was…
edyong | March 18, 2009What happens when you find a feathered dinosaur that really isn't meant to have feathers? That's the question set by a spectacular new fossil that adds a confusing dimension to the origin of feathers.
The concept of dinosaurs with feathers is no longer surprising. Birds certainly have them and they are now considered to be living dinosaurs. The infamous Velociraptor and its relatives were covered in plumes, which ranged from the simple quills of Sinosauropteryx to the flight-capable plumes on Microraptor's four wings. We know about these prehistoric feathers through the beautiful fossil…
neurophilosophy | March 3, 2009
Nervous tissue is extremely fragile, and so is very well protected. The brain, which has a jelly-like consistency, is encased in the skull, and is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which acts to cushion it against blows that might cause it to come into contact with the inside of its bony case. Likewise, the spinal cord is surrounded by the vertebrae, the series of bones which runs down from the base of the skull.
Being so soft, the brain and spinal cord decompose quickly. When an animal dies, the nervous system begins to disintegrate immediately, until the armour in which it was…
gregladen | February 15, 2009"The Giants' Shoulders" is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on "classic" scientific papers. Information about the carnival can be found here.
The last Giants' was hosted at The Questionable Authority, here. The next issue will be hosted at The Evilutionary Biologist: All Science, All The Time, which resided here.
Since this is Darwin Month in Darwin Year and almost, indeed, Darwin Day, we start with ... Paleontology. We'll get to Darwin at the end.
Early palaentologists and the Giant killer lungfish from Hell as well as the Revenge of…
neurophilosophy | February 10, 2009Bones have been big news recently, following the publication of two papers which document remarkable fossil finds. First, a group of palaeontologists led by Phil Gingerich of the University of Michigan described Maiacetus inuus, a primitive whale which lived in the water but gave birth on land, and which marks the transition between modern whales and their terrestrial ancestors. This was quickly followed by the report, from Jason Head's group at the University of Toronto, of Titanoboa cerrejonesis, a prehistoric snake which is estimated to have grown to 13 metres and to weigh more than a…
edyong | February 4, 2009
This is sure to be one of the most amazing scientific images of the year. You're looking at vertebrae from two species of snake. The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg. It's arguably the largest snake alive, so just think about how big the owner of the fossilised vertebra on the right would have been! There's a good reason why this new discovery - the largest snake that ever slithered - has been named Titanoboa.
Titanoboa cerrejonesis is new to science and was discovered by a team of North…
edyong | February 2, 2009It's snowing pretty heavily in London.
I have therefore built a snow tyrannosaur.
That is all.
Also credit to Julia the Ethical Palaeontologist for her mighty effort.
And yes, I know the posture's all wrong, but it wouldn't stand up otherwise.
edyong | January 27, 2009Thanks to its trinity of horns, Triceratops has become of the most recognisable of dinosaurs. The sight of two bulls charging at each other and jousting with their horns must have been an incredible one - geeky palaeontologists might get a small thrill just thinking about it. But did it ever really happen? Did Triceratops ever use its unmistakeable horns in combat, or were they simply for show?
Both theories have been put forward, but Andrew Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palaeontology (who blogs at the Open Source Palaeontologist) thinks that both were probably right. By looking at…
edyong | January 12, 2009Beipaiosaurus was among the strangest of dinosaurs. It looked like a fusion of body parts taken from several other species and united in the unlikeliest of proportions. It had a stocky body, long arms adorned with massive claws, a long neck topped by an incongruously small head, and a beaked mouth. Bizarre as this cocktail of features is, it's the animal skin that has currently warrants attention.
Fossils of Beipaiosaurus include impressions of its skin and these clearly show long, broad filaments clumped around its head, neck, rump and tail. They are feathers, but most unusual ones. Traces…
edyong | December 18, 2008In 1995, a palaeontologist called Mark Norrell reported an amazing discovery - the fossilised remains of a dinosaur called Troodon, sitting on top of a large clutch of eggs. The fossil was so well-preserved and its posture so unmistakeable that it provided strong proof that some dinosaurs incubated their eggs just as modern birds do. And since then, two other small predatory species - Oviraptor and Citipati - have been found in brooding positions on top of egg clutches.
But a subtler look at these fossils reveal much more about dinosaur parenting than the simple fact that it existed. To…
edyong | November 26, 2008 Clad in hard, armoured shells, turtles have a unique body plan unlike that of any other animal. Their shells have clearly served them well and the basic structure has gone largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But this unchanging nature poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how they evolved and until now, fossil turtles haven't provided any clues. All of them, just like their living descendants, have fully formed two-part shells.
But three stunning new fossils are very different. They belong to the oldest turtle ever discovered, which lived about 220 million years ago…