Tag Archive for: Dinosaur bones

Furry, spiky mammal scampered among dinosaurs

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MESOZOIC MAMMAL Spinolestes xenarthrosus lived 125 million years ago, weighed about as much as a possum and probably looked like small mammals do today.

When scales were all the rage, one early mammal sported fur and spines.

Unearthed in central Spain, a skeleton of the newly discovered small mammal, christened Spinolestes xenarthrosus, dates to 125 million years ago, paleontologist Thomas Martin of the University of Bonn in Germany and colleagues report in the Oct. 15 Nature. At the time, dinosaurs dominated the landscape.

All in all, S. xenarthrosus resembled a pretty ordinary mammal. Spikes like a hedgehog’s lined its back and provided protection from predators. The hand bones of the 24-centimeter-long mammal appear optimized for digging for insects.

This particular early Cretaceous fur ball met its end in a prehistoric swamp that preserved some skin, hair, spines and even organs — parts of an ear, lungs and liver. These samples represent the earliest well-preserved mammal hair and soft tissue, having outlasted the next in line by about 60 million years. The ancient specimen suggests that features like underbelly fur and spines appeared early in mammal evolution.

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FOSSIL FUZZ In addition to a full skeleton, an S. xenarthrosus specimen contains patches of skin, hairs and spines, lending insight into how these structures developed in mammals.

Scientists Unearth New Species of Triceratops,Horned Dinosaur Fossil Adds Hooks to Evolutionary

New Species of Triceratops

A team of Canadian scientists announced that bones found in 2010 are from a new dinosaur they named Wendiceratops. DANIELLE DUFAULT/ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM

Scientists have discovered one of the oldest horned dinosaurs, a one-ton behemoth that had spikes above its eyes, on its nose and covering almost its entire neck.

The new dinosaur, named Wendiceratops pinhornensis, is described from over 200 bones representing the remains of four specimens from the group of large-bodied dinosaurs known as the Ceratopsidea. It lived about 79 million years ago, making it 13 million years older than its famous cousin Triceratops and one of the few specimens of this group from the late Campanian period, stretching from 90 million to 77 million years ago, found in North America.

It was found at a site in southern Alberta five years ago by Wendy Sloboda, a famous fossil hunter who has made hundreds of discoveries over the past three decades.

“She came across the site in 2010 and it actually had parts of the skull weathering out on the surface,” said Royal Ontario Museum’s David Evans, who co-authored a study on the find in PLOS One with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Michael Ryan. Sloboda was part of the research team.

“When she brought them to us, we were very excited because the parts she brought back were part of the frill which has that characteristic ornamentation,” he said of the back of a dinosaur’s head. “Right away, we knew we likely had a new species of dinosaur. The first season we starting digging in 2011, we found more of the frill. At that point, we were certain. So, the race was on to collect as much as we could.”

New Species of Triceratops

The skeleton is a 3-D printed model of a Wendiceratops based on the adult bones found at a Canadian site in 2010. BRIAN BOYLE

Evans said Wendiceratops, which means “Wendy’s horned-face” (it was named for Sloboda) could be the first of this dinosaur group to have a horn – or more accurately horns.

“The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns, the nose had a large, upright horn, and it’s likely there were horns over the eyes too,” he said. “The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found.”

It featured a series of forward-curling hook-like horns that adorned the margin of the wide, shield-like frill that projects from the back of the Wendiceratops’ skull. The nasal bone, although represented by fragmentary specimens, likely supported a “prominent upright nose horn.”

“There is a huge diversity in horned dinosaurs. They are mostly differentiated from each other by the shapes, sizes and direction of the horns on their face and on their neck shield,” Evans said. “This particular one is really extravagant for any horned dinosaur. It has this array of large, forward-facing horns that surround the entire of margin of the neck shield. It would have looked like a halo of drooping horns all the way around the back of the skull.”

The nose horns, which scientists once thought were mostly for defense, are believed to have been used to attract mates and establish the dinosaurs rank in its herd – much like modern animals like antelope or water buffaloes use their horns.

It was probably even made from the same material as some modern animal horns, keratin.

The fact these fossils show horned dinosaurs go much further back than previously believed, Evans said, “helps us understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation in an iconic group of dinosaurs characterized by their horned faces.”

“We don’t actually have a good idea exactly what the nose horn looked like in terms of its overall shape,” he said, adding they had three partial specimens but no complete nose horn.

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Field crew systematically excavating the

“But what we can say is that it looks transitional between its ancestors that lacked a horn and later horned dinosaurs that had very prominent, very tall conical horns over their nose,” he said. “This skull ornamentation devolved very rapidly in the diversification of horned dinosaurs which suggests that mating signals were key in the early radiation of the group.”

Andrew Farke, a paleontologist with Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology who last year discovered Aquilops, the oldest horned dinosaur in North America that lived as far back as 145 million years ago, said the latest discovery offers fresh insight into the dinosaur horn.

Horned dinosaurs were commonplace during the Cretaceous period but died out when the Earth was struck by what scientists believe was an asteroid. They then emerged again with the Ceratopsidea group that included Wendiceratops.

“Wendiceratops is the oldest known horned dinosaur to have a big nose horn, so it’s nice to help us figure out when and how that classic skull feature evolved,” he said in an email interview. “Most interestingly, it adds to a body of evidence that shows big nose horns evolved at least twice in horned dinosaurs. Again and again, distantly related species of these dinosaurs converged on similar anatomy.”

The other revelation was the sheer number of fossils found at this bone bed. There are signs that scores of Wendiceratops died here, possibly from a flood or some other natural catastrophe. Today, it’s a remote stretch of badlands but, in the day of Wendiceratops, it would have been a low-lying coastal plain that looked more like Louisiana.

“There is no sign of deposits running out so there could be dozens of individuals in the bone bed,” Evans said. “It actually reinforces that Wendiceratops was a social animal. We have evidence these animals died together so it’s likely therefore they were living together as part of a herd when they were struck by a catastrophe such as a flood.”

 

New Dinosaur Species Which is close relative with triceratops, the regaliceratops, discovered in Canada

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An artist’s reconstruction of the new horned dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi. Illustration: Julius T. Csotonyi/Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta.

When fossil experts first clapped eyes on the skull, it was clearly from a strange, horned dinosaur. When they noticed how stunted the bony horns were, its nickname, Hellboy, was assured.

The near-complete skull of the 70 million-year-old beast was spotted by chance 10 years ago, protruding from a cliff that runs along the Oldman river south of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Painstakingly excavated, cleaned up and measured since then, the fossilised remains have now been identified as a relative of the three-horned triceratops, and the first example of a horned dinosaur to be found in that region of North America.

New Dinosaur Species Which is close relative with triceratops (2)

The near-complete regaliceratops skull, first spotted protruding from a cliff in Alberta, Canada. Photograph: Sue Sabrowski/Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta

Like triceratops, the new species was a herbivore. But it sported a more impressive shield, or frill, at the back of its skull, decorated with large triangular and pentagonal plates. The extraordinary features led researchers to name the new species Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a reference to the impressive crown-like frill, and to Peter Hews, a Calgary-based geologist who first spotted part of the skull jutting from the rockface in 2005.

Researchers came up with the Hellboy nickname long before they had liberated the full skull from the cliff face. The main reason was that the rock the fossil was embedded in was incredibly hard, making excavation a hellish, and years-long, task. That job was made even tougher because the Oldman river is a protected fish-breeding ground, meaning the scientists had to erect a dam at the site to prevent debris from the excavation falling into the river.

“It was a coincidence, but when we noticed that the skull had these short horns over the eyes, that really solidified the nickname,” Caleb Brown at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta told the Guardian. In the Hellboy comics and movies, the eponmymous demon grinds his horns to stumps with an electric sander to help him fit in with mere mortals.

But the horns of the dinosaur tell a more interesting story. Triceratops belonged to a group of horned dinosaurs called chasmosaurines. These had a small horn over the nose and two larger horns over the eyes. And while regaliceratops is definitely a chasmosaurine, it has a long nose horn and puny horns over its eyes. These features, opposite to those characteristic of triceratops, are seen in a different group of horned dinosaurs, called centrosaurines, which were extinct by the time regaliceratops came along.

The bizarre mix of features is an example of convergent evolution, where one species evolves bodily characteristics that arose separately in other species through the course of prehistory. Brown and his colleague, Donald Henderson, describe the creature’s remains in Current Biology.

“This is a really interesting new dinosaur,” said Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at Edinburgh University. “It’s a close relative of triceratops, but it’s horns and skull frill are very different. They look a lot more like other types of horned dinosaurs that lived earlier in time, which went extinct before triceratops thrived.

“What it’s indicating is that there was massive convergence between the horns and frills of those horned dinosaurs that were thriving during the final few million years before the asteroid hit and killed off the dinosaurs. Because this new dinosaur is one of the latest surviving horned dinosaurs, living at a similar time as triceratops, it is also telling us that horned dinosaurs remained quite diverse right until the end. To me, this is a strong hint that these dinosaurs were at or near the top of their game when that asteroid fell out of the sky,” he said.

Dinosaur Footprints Uncovered on Beach After Giant Tide

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A giant tide on France’s North Atlantic coast, March 21, 2015, enabled paleontologists to find hundreds of dinosaur footprints on a beach in the Western region of Vendee.

A giant tide on France’s North Atlantic coast on Saturday enabled paleontologists to find hundreds of dinosaur footprints on a beach in the Western region of Vendee.

The 200 million-year-old footprints measure about 17 inches wide and are only visible when the tide is low. They were discovered in 1963 by a local engineer and chemist Gilbert Bessonnat.

“This open-air museum of dinosaur footprints counts among the richest we have from the Jurassic era,” local authorities said on the city hall website.

France’s National Hydrographic Service was expecting more than 15.3 yards difference between low tide on Saturday afternoon and high tide in the evening.

The trail would have been left by animals measuring between 8-feet 2-inches and 9-feet 10-inches, amateur paleontologists told French TV while visiting the site. A dozen different species are known to have lived on a 26,000-foot tall mountain, now a cliff eroding into a beach.

 

Feds to return 70-million-year-old dinosaur fossil to Mongolian government

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The feds filed court papers to return this 70-million-year-old fossil to the Mongolian government after a dealer allegedly attempted to smuggle them into America.

The feds are sending home a 70-million-year-old Mongolian dinosaur.

Its fossilized skull and vertebrae, that is.

Brooklyn prosecutors have filed a lawsuit to seize the stolen remains, which the fossil dealer falsely described in shipping documents as a cheap replica of dinosaur bones from France.

Last January, the ancient bones were shipped through the United Parcel Service by Geofossils Inc. of France with its destination a storage facility in Long Island City, Queens, according to papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

But suspicious Customs and Border Protection officers put a hold on the shipment and sought further documentation.

The fossil dealer confessed that the skull and vertebrae were originally from Mongolia and also clarified that although the UPS invoice stated that the items were being sold for $3,400, a buyer had actually agreed to a purchase price of $250,000, according to the court papers.

U.S. officials contacted the Mongolian government, which tracked down the original copy of the certificate of origin cited by Geofossils Inc.

The paperwork described the shipment only as four traditional dwelling structures. The Geofossils certificate of origin provided to the feds had been altered to add references to a combination of dwellings and Tarbosaurus dinosaur fossils in the shipment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Karin Orenstein alleges in the suit.

“Property of cultural and historic significance that has been stolen from other countries will not find safe harbor in our ports,” said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch.

“We are proud of our ongoing role in the repatriation of stolen and smuggled cultural property to its rightful owners.

“The fossils are the rightful property of Mongolia and cannot be sold to non-Mongolians or permanently exported out of the homeland,” Lynch said.

 

Dinosaur bones scanned to discover more about weighty issue

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Palaeontologist Scott Hocknull analyses the Diamantinasaurus fossils at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs facility in Winton, Western Queensland.

It was a scan 100 million years in the making.

The bones of one of Queensland’s largest dinosaurs, Matilda, have undergone a CT scan to discover how her limbs coped with 20 tonnes of flesh on top.

University of New England PhD student Ada Klinkharmer borrowed some of the sauropod’s leg and hip bones from their home at Australian Age of Dinosaurs in Winton, and had them tested at Mt Isa Hospital.

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Artistic representations of the three dinosaur taxa described here. Australovenator (top); Wintonotitan (middle); Diamantinasaurus (bottom). Photo: Artwork by: T. Tischler, Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History.

 

“We create 3D computer models and we can put forces on them, and measure the stress,” she said.
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“We can look at the bones we’ve measured and look at how that stress is distributed around the limbs, and discover how these dinosaurs bore their weight.”Diamantinasaurus matildae was discovered in June 2005 at the Winton Formation. She would have been 15 to 16 metres long and 2.5 metres high at the hip.Ms Klinkharmer said it is a common supposition that the large, long-necked herbivores stood on hind legs to graze, but it’s never been proven.”Using this method, we can actually physically test if the bones were capable of sustaining 20 odd tonnes on just two legs,” she said.”Obviously they had to raise up onto their hind legs for mating, but whether or not they could do it for a sustained length of time is the question.”She said the CT scan was an interesting process.”You’ve got to be careful to make sure you don’t break anything in the process,” Ms Klinkharmer said.”But it works exactly the same as when you CT scan a person – you put it on the table, slide it in and scan it.”However, she admitted not being able to scan the thigh bone was disappointing.”It’s obviously made of rock now, and it’s so heavy, the CT scan can’t support the weight of the femur.”Ms Klinkharmer, whose work on biomechanics forms part of the Function, Evolution and Anatomy laboratory at UNE, hopes to publish her results early next year. Dinosaur fans will be able to see some theories about how dinosaurs may have moved at the Queensland  Discovery from March 27, which features more than 20 life-size dinosaur animatronics.