April 5, 2006, 9:34 PM CT

Giant Raptor Dinosaur Discovered

Eventhough represented only by the fossilized remains of hand and foot bones, comparisons with more complete skeletons found in Asia demonstrate that this animal was about seven feet tall when standing upright. Discovery of this Utah giant, which is much larger than its counterparts in Canada and the northern US, nearly doubles the documented range of these dinosaurs in North America, and demonstrates that they roamed much farther south than previously thought. A scientific paper naming and describing this animal, and reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, was authored by Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History (UMNH), and associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

The new dinosaur, formally dubbed Hagryphus giganteus, which means "giant four-footed, bird-like god of the western desert" in reference to the animal's outward resemblance to a large land bird, its giant stature, and its discovery in the Utah desert. Hagryphus is a member of the oviraptorosaurs, a group of bird-like feathered dinosaurs with toothless beaks, powerful arms and formidable claws. These enigmatic animals are thought by some paleontologists to have been omnivorous, feeding on a mixture of meat and plants. Eventhough only the hands and feet of Hagryphus are known, the researchers were able to use the animal"s close relatives to estimate the size of the skeleton. The scientists say they do not know why this dinosaur was so much larger than its northern cousins but speculate that it may have been correlation to different environmental conditions in the south.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

April 5, 2006, 9:29 PM CT

The Case Of The Missing Dinosaur

It was no ordinary crime. The "victim" was more than 16 feet tall, weighed several tons, and died some 150 million years ago.

A skeleton of an Allosaurus-the largest and most ferocious meat-eating dinosaur of the Jurassic age-had been illegally dug up on federal land in Utah. When we got wind of it, we opened a case. Why? We have the ticket on theft of government property.

Our challenge? First, find the skeleton. Then, gather proof linking it to the Utah theft.

How'd we track down the skeleton? That was the easy part. Someone overheard a man at a bar bragging how he'd made a ton of money digging up a fossil that ended up in a Japanese museum. With some investigative legwork, we found both men. They talked-told us exactly where they'd dug up the dinosaur as well as the name of the Pennsylvania fossil dealer who hired them for the job.

Now, to the scene of the crime. In Utah, we put together a team of experts to gather evidence at the site: a special agent, five members of our Salt Lake City Evidence Response Team, two paleontologists from the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a BLM agent, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney. They hiked several miles up the western edge of the San Rafael Swell Mountain Range (see photograph) and found the exact spot of the dinosaur dig.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

April 4, 2006, 8:24 PM CT

Dinosaur Tumor Studied for Human Cancer Clues

Cancer in dinosaurs and illnesses in other animals are being studied in a groundbreaking new program that combines medical school with the study of natural history.

Educators hope the effort will produce doctors with a better understanding of why we get sick.

Despite being millions of years removed from our time and our own species, illnesses in animals like the dinosaurs can shed light on the evolution of human disease, says Christopher Beard, curator and specialist in vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

"Some diseases that afflict humans today, such as malaria, gout, and cancer, are truly ancient and were handed down to us from our distant ancestors," Beard told LiveScience. "By studying the distribution of these diseases in other living and fossil organisms, we can gain insights into the nature of these diseases".........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

March 29, 2006, 10:28 PM CT

More Evidence Chicxulub Was Too Early

A new study of melted rock ejected far from the Yucatan's Chicxulub impact crater bolsters the idea that the famed impact was too early to have caused the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

A careful geochemical fingerprinting of glass spherules found in multiple layers of sediments from northeast Mexico, Texas, Guatemala, Belize and Haiti all point back to Chicxulub as their source. But the analysis places the impact at about 300,000 years before the infamous extinctions that mark the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, a.k.a. the K-T boundary.

Using an array of electron microscopy techniques, Markus Harting of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has found that chemical compositions of the spherules all match what would be expected of rocks melted at the Chicxulub impact. The spherules are now found in several layers because after they originally hit the ground, they were "reworked" by erosion to create later layers of sediments, he said. It's this reworking long after the impact that has misplaced some of the spherules into sediments that, based on the fossils in the same sediments, are misleadingly close to the K-T boundary.

Harting is scheduled to present his latest findings on Monday, 3 April Backbone of the Americas-Patagonia to Alaska. The meeting is co-convened by the Geological Society of America and the Asociacion Geologica Argentina, with collaboration of the Sociedad Geologica de Chile. The meeting takes place 3-7 April in Mendoza, Argentina.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

March 15, 2006, 7:03 AM CT

Neandertals lecture at The University of Auckland

Professor Harold Dibble, a renowned specialist in Neandertal behaviour and culture, will give lectures on current research and debates on Neandertals at The University of Auckland on 4 and 6 April 2006.

Harold Dibble, who is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a Hood Fellow at The University of Auckland, specialises in the Palaeolithic archaeology of the Near East, Egypt and Western Europe, the origins and evolution of human culture and cognition, and computer applications in anthropology.

He is renowned for his insights into how archaeological sites form, how they should be excavated and interpreted, and how this should be accomplished to the highest possible standard using modern IT.

In his lecture on 4 April, "Current Debate on Neandertals", he will examine one of the most controversial subjects in studies of human evolution - understanding the relationship, both biological and cultural, of Neandertals to modern Homo sapiens. Did they possess language and other characteristics of modern culture? His lecture will explore these questions and present an overview of how researchers are currently trying to answer them. View more details on this lecture.

His second lecture, "Current Research on Neandertal Behaviour", draws on recent excavations in France and Egypt to highlight some of the major problems that researchers face when interpreting ancient archaeological material, and presents new findings that shed important light on the lives of Neandertal groups. View more details on this lecture.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

March 9, 2006, 11:56 PM CT

Mass Extinctions - A Threat from Outer Space?

Earth history has been punctuated by several mass extinctions rapidly wiping out nearly all life forms on our planet. What causes these catastrophic events? Are they really due to meteorite impacts? Current research suggests that the cause may come from within our own planet - the eruption of vast amounts of lava that brings a cocktail of gases from deep inside the Earth and vents them into the atmosphere.

University of Leicester geologists, Professor Andy Saunders and Dr Marc Reichow, are taking a fresh look at what may actually have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and caused other similarly cataclysmic events, aware they may end up exploding a few popular myths.

The idea that meteorite impacts caused mass extinctions has been in vogue over the last 25 years, since Louis Alverez's research team in Berkeley, California published their work about an extraterrestrial iridium anomaly found in 65-million-year-old layers at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. This anomaly only could be explained by an extraterrestrial source, a large meteorite, hitting the Earth and ultimately wiping the dinosaurs - and a number of other organisms - off the Earth's surface.

Professor Saunders commented:

"Impacts are suitably apocalyptic. They are the stuff of Hollywood. It seems that every kid's dinosaur book ends with a bang. But are they the real killers and are they solely responsible for every mass extinction on earth? There is scant evidence of impacts at the time of other major extinctions e.g., at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, and at the end of the Triassic, 200 million years ago. The evidence that has been found does not seem large enough to have triggered an extinction at these times".........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

March 7, 2006, 9:45 PM CT

Remains Of The Ancient Maya Culture

Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. Now, NASA and university researchers are using space- and aircraft-based "remote-sensing" technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization's ancient building materials.

NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin, both from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are teaming with William Saturno, an archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, to locate the ruins of the ancient culture.

"From the air, everything but the tops of very few surviving pyramids are hidden by the tree canopy," said Sever, widely recognized for two decades as a pioneer in the use of remote-sensing for archaeology. "On the ground, the 60- to 100-foot trees and dense undergrowth can obscure objects as close as 10 feet away. Explorers can stumble right through an ancient city that once housed thousands - and never even realize it."

Sever has explored the use of remote-sensing, the science of collecting information about the Earth's surface using aerial or space-based photography, to serve archaeology. He and Irwin provided Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA's Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument flown aboard a high-altitude weather plane, capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

March 6, 2006, 11:56 PM CT

Smallest Triceratops Skull Described

With its big, hockey puck-sized eyes, shortened face and nubby horns, it was probably as cute as a button - at least to its mother, a three-horned dinosaur called Triceratops that could weigh as much as 10 tons and had one of the largest skulls of any land animal on the planet.

Visitors to the University of California, Berkeley's Valley Life Sciences Building now can judge for themselves. A cast of the foot-long skull from the youngest Triceratops fossil ever found is on display in the building's Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library. The actual skull, also at UC Berkeley and in fragments, is described by campus paleontologist Mark Goodwin in the recent issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Mounted in the library's entryway, the diminutive skull, likely from a year-old, three-foot-long baby, is dwarfed by the more than six-foot-long skull of a mature Triceratops. Standing menacingly outside the library's doors is a life-size cast of Triceratops' nemesis, Tyrannosaurus rex.

Despite the pup's size, its remains are telling Goodwin a lot about how dinosaurs grew, the purpose of their head ornaments and the characteristics of their ancestors. In particular, since the horns and frill are present from a very early age, it is unlikely they were used exclusively for sexual display, he said.........

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March 1, 2006, 11:36 PM CT

First Amazon-Andean crop plant transfer

Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and his colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.

Heading to the supermarket to pick up some corn flour, a couple of tomatoes or a can of beans commonly doesn't conjure up the notion of 10,000 years of agricultural development in the Americas--a transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures actively developing and trading new food crops. But this transition is still inadequately understood. New excavations and a growing collection of plant microfossil remains rapidly adds pieces to this puzzle.

A multidisciplinary team excavated a stone house at Waynuna, north of Arequipa on the western slope of the Andes and analyzed plant remains from three grinding stones.

Arrowroot from the Amazon. Starchy arrowroot (Maranta sp.) tubers don't grow in the Andean highlands. So the presence of tiny Arrowroot starch grains and phytoliths on the grinding stones and in associated sediments means that people were moving tubers from lowland Amazon rainforest sites east of the Andes west to the Waynuna site.........

Posted by: Jessica      Permalink     

February 28, 2006, 11:25 PM CT

Early Americans Faced Pleistocene Climate Changes

The environment encountered when the first people emigrated into the New World was variable and ever-changing, as per a Penn State geologist.

"The New World was not a nice quiet place when humans came," says Dr. Russell Graham, associate professor of geology and director of the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum.

Archaeologists agree that by 11,000 years ago, people were spread across North and South America, but evidence is building for an earlier entry into the New World, a date that would put human population of North and South America firmly in the Pleistocene.

"We want to know what it was like back then," says Graham. "What did they have to deal with?".

The Pleistocene Holocene transition took place about 11,000 years ago and caused the extinction of a large number of animal species including mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths. The Holocene looked very different from the Pleistocene.

"We now realize that climate changes extremely rapidly," Graham told attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today (Feb.19) in St. Louis, Mo. "The Pleistocene to Holocene transition occurred in about 40 years."As a result, animals and plants shifted around and the people living in the New World had to adapt so that they could find the necessary resources to survive. Graham likened the change to the difference between shopping at a WalMart where there is great abundance and large variety - the Pleistocene - to suddenly having to shop at a corner convenience store - the Holocene. In human terms this means that what grandparents knew to be true about finding resources, could be untrue and not helpful to grandchildren.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

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