The Fossil Record

Titanoboa!

Texas state dino gets a name change

By Paul J. Weber

From Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - Pleurocoelus has served ably as the official dinosaur of Texas. Sure, it was a plant-noshing herbivore in a fiercely barbecue-proud state, but the sauropod dwarfed most other dinos and lumbered with a 20-ton swagger.

Then he was exposed as an East Coaster.

The discovery in 2007 led a lawmaker in the southern state to file a resolution in the Legislature this month that seeks to send Pleurocoelus packing and transfer the state dinosaur title to a very similar but more uniquely Texas species, newly dubbed Paluxysaurus jonesi.

That's paluxysaurus as in the Paluxy River in Central Texas, where a graduate student found the dinosaur crowned by state lawmakers in 1997 was really a 112-million-year-old impostor.

"It's important to get things right," said Aaron Pan, curator of science for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. "If it's not the same thing, you can't really call it that."

Official state flowers, songs, and birds are more common in the United States, but Texas is among a handful of states that also have chosen official dinosaurs.

Passage of the measure is a virtual guarantee, while the legislature struggles with the recession, shortfalls in tax revenue and paying for hurricane damage.

The resolution repairs what is largely a case of mistaken identity. Pleurocoelus and Paluxysaurus were both giraffe-necked and enormous four-footed herbivores, with a close resemblance to the more widely known brachiosaurus.

Peter Rose was studying at Southern Methodist University when he began scrutinizing fossils — thought to belong to Pleurocoelus — that littered a Hood County ranch. The prevalence of the remains helped sell the sauropod as state's official dinosaur in the first place.

Paleontologists had long accepted the fossils belonged to Pleurocoelus, whose bones were first dug up in Maryland. But Rose found the juvenile pleurocoelus specimens in Maryland didn't match the adult bones found in Texas.

Rose determined he had a whole new dinosaur on his hands. After tinkering with the name, he settled on incorporating Paluxy and stamped the species as jonesi, in a tribute to the Jones Ranch and its rich collection of fossils.

He then published a paper in 2007 explaining how Texas had been duped.

"I was more intimidated by throwing that out to my peers and the dinosaur community," said Rose, now at the University of Minnesota.

Rose said he's unaware of any challenges to his paper.

Texas boasted its share of dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex is thought to have prowled around Big Bend while the meat-eater Acrocanthus, named from an Oklahoma specimen, skulked near the Paluxysaurus. Tracks even suggest the Texas sauropod and Oklahoma's Acrocanthus tangled in the early Cretaceous.

Louis Jacobs, an SMU professor and paleontologist, has a hunch of which prevailed.

"It's hard to knock a big thing down," said Jacobs, who was also Rose's mentor at SMU. "If those tracks are telling the correct story, the sauropod kept on walking on."

Image from the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

Teeny tiny whale ancestor

Illustration from the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy

What do whales and deer have in common? Sure, they are both mammals, but beyond that, not much--until now. According to scientists at the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy, whales may have evolved from small, deer-like animals that lived almost 50 million years ago in the Kashmir region of the Far East. Many previously thought an early, extinct type of hippopotamus was a whale's closest relative.

Now, they say there are very important similarities between whales, which date back to about 50 million years ago, and a fossil of a racoon-sized, hoofed animal belonging to the raoellid family.

Indohyus is the species of raoellid believed to be the missing link between whales and their land-dwelling ancestors. The telltale sign of their resemblance is inside their ears. Their ear bones are partially thickened in the same unique way that whales' ear bones are. Whales are the only other animal that have this trait.

Indohyus was also an aquatic wader who hunted for fish in shallow water. Scientists believe that the animal may have gone back to the seas, from where it once evolved, in order to take advantage of the water's bounty of food.

To learn more about this exciting discovery and Indohyus, go to Northeastern Ohio University's whale evolution page.

T. Rex footprint found?

Source: AFP

British paleontologist Phil Manning thinks he may have found one of the world's first T. rex footprints, in the famous Hell Creek fossil formation of Montana. The footprint, which is about 30 inches long and covers an area of about 11 square feet, cannot be identified with 100 percent certainty, but because of the footprint's size and the fact that Hell Creek is famous for its T. rex treasure trove, Dr. Manning is pretty sure the 67 million year-old print is from the famous monstrous predator.

Angela Milner, associate keeper of palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum, thinks it could be a T. rex print. She plans to compare it to another, slightly smaller footprint that was found in New Mexico in 1993, also thought to be from a T. rex.

"It is never possible to be certain of the animal that made fossil footprints as they do not die conveniently at the end of their tracks," she says. "However both these prints occur in rocks of the right age, they definitely were made by large carnivorous dinosaurs -- and the only one that was that large enough to leave such a huge footprint was Tyrannosaurus rex."

China builds dam to protect dino fossils

Story from China Daily

Workers have spent three years building a huge earth dam to protect valuable dinosaur bones from being washed away by one of China's most famous rivers.

A horde of dinosaur bones lies buried in a mountain that sits right on the river that forms the boundary between China and Russia - the Heilongjiang River.

So far, thousands of dinosaur fossil bones have been unearthed from the mountain and assembled into 13 dinosaur skeletons, which are now exhibited in several museums nationwide.

Archaeologists believe there are enough fossil bones buried in the mountain to put together at least 100 more dinosaur skeletons. Every summer, rising waters and strong currents erode parts of the mountain, leaving dinosaur fossils exposed. Many fossils have been washed away in the past.

So the Land and Resources Department of Heilongjiang Province ordered the building of a 1,450-meter-long embankment on the Chinese bank of the river to stop the fossils being washed away.

Building the embankment has been hard, with workers battling cold and long winters at a high altitude in China's cold northernmost province. Rising water levels in the summer also limit construction times, and it has taken workers three years to complete the 1,450-meter-long, 5.5-meter-high and 10-meter wide embankment around the dinosaur fossil site.

"The embankment could effectively protect the Dinosaur Mountain from threats of water erosion and floods, thus, the dinosaur fossils are rescued from being washed away," said Li Jinshan, vice-director of Jiayin Dinosaur National Geologic Park Administrative Bureau.

Dinosaur Mountain, which used to be called Mountain of Dinosaur Bones, is inside Jiayin Dinosaur National Geologic Park at Jiayin County, Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

To learn more about the unique and important dinosaur discoveries of China, check out a new exhibit about them at the Miami Science Museum, where this Sinraptor hepingensis skeleton is on display.

Orchids brightened dino decor!

Do you think T. rex was the kind of dinosaur who liked to stop and smell the roses? Well, maybe not roses--but new fossil evidence confirms that orchids existed about 80 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, around the time that our favorite King of Lizards still ruled the earth.

Scientists knew that other flowering plants appeared in the Cretaceous, like magnolia trees and water lilies, but orchids had been missing from the fossil record until the recent discovery of a ancient bee who was covered in orchid pollen when he got stuck in amber and was then preserved for history. That bee was only 15 or 20 millions of years old (ONLY), but scientists were able to collect the pollen and use a "molecular-clock" method to estimate how long orchids have existed on earth. The molecular-clock method of dating a species calculates a rate of time during which genetic mutations of species can be expected to occur. Based on calculations they make using that timeframe, scientists can roughly draw a picture of a species' family tree.

So maybe--just maybe--T. rex picked flowers from his garden with his tiny arms!

It makes for a good story, anyway.

Baby mammoth found in Siberia

When a Russian scientist saw something sticking out of the frozen ground a few months ago while hiking in Siberia (maybe I'll consider that vacation idea next time summer hits Texas), he thought it was the body of a reindeer. But upon further inspection, he realized he had found an almost perfectly preserved baby mammoth. The approximately six-month-old baby's shaggy fur coat was gone, but other than that, she looked almost exactly like she did when she died--almost 40,000 years ago!

Because she is in such great condition, "Lyuba," as she has been named, gives scientists a chance to learn many new facts about her species. "This specimen may provide unique material allowing us to ultimately decipher the genetic makeup of the mammoth," says Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science's Zoological Institute, where Lyuba is being kept in a special refrigerator so she can be studied, according to Reuters news service.

Weighing 110 lbs. and measuring about 4 feet long, Lyuba is roughly the same size as a large dog.

Five-foot tall prehistoric penguin discovered!

From Associated Press and the International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: Giant penguins roamed what is now Peru more than 40 million years ago, much earlier than scientists thought the flightless birds had spread to warmer climates.

Best known for their presence in Antarctica, penguins today live on many islands in the Southern Hemisphere, some even near the equator.

But scientists thought they had not reached warm areas until about 10 million years ago.

Now, researchers report that they have found remains of two types of penguin in Peru that date to 40 million years ago.

One of them was a 5-foot (1.5-meter) giant with a long, sharp beak.

Paleontologist Julia Clarke, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, said she was surprised at the find.

"This is the same age as the earliest penguins from South America. The only other record from the continent of that age is from the southernmost tip of the continent," she said. "The new finds indicate they reached equatorial regions much earlier than anyone previously thought."

The big bird is larger than any penguin known today and the third largest known to have ever lived, she added.

It is particularly unusual for such a large penguin to have been living in a warm climate, she noted. "In most cases, the larger individuals of a species or among related species are correlated with colder climes and higher latitudes."

The beak of the large penguin, named Icadyptes salasi, "looks remarkably spearlike," she said. But the researchers do not know its exact feeding style.

The second new species, Perudyptes devriesi , was approximately the same size as a living King Penguin
(2 1/2 to 3 feet (0.9 meters) tall) and represents a very early part of penguin evolutionary history, the researchers said.

(stock photo)

Big scary chicken?

Reuters

These days, scientists are scrambling to keep up with all the dino news happening in the world. Just last week, a report came out that a huge, beaked bird-like dinosaur was discovered in China. He's been named Gigantoraptor erlianensis. Gigantoraptor was related to therapods like Oviraptor, but he was probably at least 35 times bigger than any of his relatives! He was about 16 feet tall and 26 feet long.

Gigantoraptor roamed the earth about 85 million years ago. He was flightless and toothless, but he appeared to be quite a fast runner. Scientists base this idea on the fact that the giant's hind legs (he was bipedal, or walked on two legs) were longer and slimmer than other dinosaurs of his type. He also probably had feathers, though they looked a little different than the feathers we are used to, and may have only covered his arms and tail.

"If you saw a mouse as big as a pig you would be very surprised – it is the same when we found the Gigantoraptor," said Xing Xu, the paleontologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who found Gigantoraptor. "It is an unexpected discovery."

Xing is one of the world's leading fossil hunters. He has discovered more than 20 new dinosaur species in China.

Baby dinosaur makes his mark

I must have had a bat in my belfry last week when I decided to tear up my old, crumbly kitchen floor and paint the boards underneath. Because just as I was putting up a blockade over the wet paint to keep my goofy dog from walking through it, he did just that--and left cute little green pawprints all over the rest of the house. I spent the afternoon cleaning them up, and it was not very much fun.

But you can rest assured that a Colorado scientist was very happy when he recently discovered footprints left in ancient mud that were made by an infant Stegosaurus. They are the first Stegosaurus hatchling prints ever found!

The tracks are the size of a half dollar, which means the baby Steg was probably about the same size as a human infant, according to researchers.

"The tracks are so crisply preserved that I can imagine the sound of tiny feet splashing up water when the baby dinosaurs came to this ancient river to drink and cool down," Morrison Natural History Museum Director Matthew Mossbrucker, who found the tracks, said. "I still can't get over just how small these footprints are."

The fossil tracks are now on permanent display at the Morrison Natural History Museum, so if you are near Denver this summer, pay them a visit!