Fee Fi Fo Fum

I smell the blood of a Tricertops......Or we could say this was as obvious as the nose on his face...after all with a snout like that why is this a surprize?!

Tyrannosaurus Rex could sniff out distant prey even at night, yet another reason the flesh-ripping predator reigned supreme as king of the dinosaurs, according to a study published on Wednesday.
Earlier research had shown that the towering T-rex could see better than an eagle and would have been able to run down the fastest of humans.
The new study now unveils a previously unheralded weapon in the fearsome theropod's arsenal: a dangerously keen sense of smell.


SEE:
Dino Time
T-Rex In Your Gas Tank
Hooversaurus
Sex Can Be Dangerous
Sudbury And The Dinosaurs
Dinos and World Systems Theory
Prehistoric Bi-Plane
More Dino News
Prehistoric Happy Feet
Creationism Is Not Science
Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives



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Dino In The Basement

There is no need for expensive expeditions to exotic locales to discover rare or undiscovered dinosaurs. One simply needs to go to the basement.

ROM uncovers dinosaur bones --in its basement

For the Royal Ontario Museum, the recent discovery of a massive Barosaurus skeleton is quite a find: It was inside the museum, and it's been there for 45 years.

In 1962, ROM curator Gordon Edmund brought the dinosaur skeleton to the museum in a trade with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. But the specimens were forgotten when Dr. Edmund retired from the museum in 1990; he has since died.

"Nobody at the museum knew about them, or what their significance was," said David Evans, the ROM's associate curator of vertebrate paleontology. ''Or that they belonged to a single animal. The curators here over the last 20 years didn't realize we had the specimen in the collection and didn't know what it was."

ROM director William Thorsell, standing with a 150-kilogram Barosaurus thigh bone and drawing of the dinosaur, describes the upcoming Age of Dinosaurs exhibit, opening on Dec. 15.

Untouched on a shelf for 113 years: a dusty bone of the dinosaur no one knew existed

Mike Taylor was rummaging among the shelves of the Natural History Museum in London when he came across it - a label stuck to a dusty fossil that struck the part-time dinosaur enthusiast as distinctly wrong.

For 113 years it had barely attracted a second look, stored deep below the museum after being dismissed as just another fossil from a common North American dinosaur. In fact, what the computer programmer from Gloucestershire had found was evidence of a new species that lived 140m years ago.

The dinosaur, now named Xenoposeidon proneneukus, belonged to a previously unknown family of sauropods, according to the journal of the British Paleontological Association, which reports the discovery for the first time today.

It was about the size of an elephant and weighed as much as 7.5 tonnes, the paper suggests.

The astonishing find came last January during a day of PhD research spent picking through bones to learn more about sauropods, the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth. Taylor was visiting the museum as part of a his research at Portsmouth University. He hoped to work out what fossil fragments tell us about sauropods unearthed in a giant slab of rock that stretches under most of Britain and out to the continent.

The bone of a Xenoposeidon proneneukus dinosaur. Photograph: Portsmouth University/PA

That was two finds last week.

Then there was this case of the dino in the basement at the University of Alberta last year.

Edmontonian Discovers New Dinosaur

And this case as well.

Old croc looks like bizarre crossbreed

Rossella Lorenzi Discovery News

Friday, 27 January 2006

The discovery of a six-foot-long, bipedal and toothless fossil in a museum basement suggests crocodile ancestors looked like some bird-like dinosaurs that lived millions of years later, scientists say.

The crocodile ancestor fossil, found in the basement of New York's American Museum of Natural History, is an example of how similar body types can evolve several times over.

A museum team excavated the 210-million-year-old fossil in the 1940s from the Ghost Ranch Quarry in New Mexico.

This site has produced numerous fossils of Coelophysis, small, carnivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Triassic period.

SEE:

Hooversaurus


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Coelophysis, Xenoposeidon proneneukus, Gordon Edmund, Barosaurus

Hooversaurus

Don't have a Mesozoic cow man.

See even dinosaurs required janitors.

Dinosaur found with vacuum-cleaner mouth

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer

Article Launched: 11/16/2007 03:26:20 AM PST

WASHINGTON—A dinosaur with a strange jaw designed to hoover-up food grazed in what is now the Sahara Desert 110 million years ago. Remains of the creature that "flabbergasted" paleontologist Paul Sereno went on display Thursday at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where they will remain until March.

Sereno and colleagues recovered, assembled and named the creature—Nigersaurus taqueti—that he said seems to break all the rules, yet still existed.

"The biggest eureka moment was when I was sitting at the desk with this jaw," he said. "I was sitting down just looking at it and saw a groove and ... realized that all the teeth were up front."

It's not normally a good idea to have all the teeth in the front of the jaw—hundreds in this case.

Sure, "it's great for nipping," Sereno said, "but that's not where you want do your food processing."

"That was an amazing moment, we knew we had something no one had ever seen before," Sereno recalled.

Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago, said the first evidence of Nigersaurus was found in the 1990s and now researchers have been able to reconstruct its skull and skeleton.

While Nigersaurus' mouth is shaped like the wide intake slot of a vacuum, it has something lacking in most cleaners—hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth to grind up its food.

Fossil is new family of dinosaur [BBC News]

Herbivore dinosaur grazed like a cow

It has been 60 years since French paleontologists found the dinosaur's bones in Saharan Africa, and 10 years since Paul C. Sereno of the University

Whole new picture of plant- eating dinosaurs

Could an elephant-size dinosaur with a skull so thin that a karate chop would have split it in two, teeth that lasted only a month, and a brain …

Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur [PLoS ONE]

Dinosaur from Sahara ate like a 'mesozoic cow' [Press Release]

National Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/dinosaurs and http://www.projectexploration.org.

SEE:

Sudbury And The Dinosaurs

Dinos and World Systems Theory

Prehistoric Bi-Plane

More Dino News

Prehistoric Happy Feet

Creationism Is Not Science

Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives

T-Rex In Your Gas Tank

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Sahara, niger, Mesozoic cow , Nigersaurus

298 Baptistina

The more important discovery of a particular asteroid hitting earth, and wiping out the dinosaurs, which is how the MSM covered it, is the final two paragraph's.

IT WAS once suggested, to illustrate the chaotic and unpredictable way in which natural systems behave, that the beat of a butterfly's wing in China could eventually trigger a hurricane in the Atlantic. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the point was that even in the theoretically deterministic world of Newtonian mechanics, only a small amount of complexity is needed to make practical prediction well nigh impossible.

Thus it is perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds to suggest that the collision 160m years ago of two space rocks, albeit quite large ones, resulted in the stormy death almost 100m years later of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. For although the orbits of the planets look to astronomers like a model of regular, Newtonian clockwork, on a scale of millions of years, the solar system is every bit as chaotic as the Earth's weather.

Around 65 million years ago, one 10-kilometre-wide piece crunched into Earth, unleashing a firestorm and kicking up clouds of dust that filtered out sunlight. In this enduring winter, much vegetation was wiped out and the species that depended on them also became extinct. Only those animals that could cope with the new challenge.

The trace of the great event, called the Cretaceous/Tertiary (or K-T) extinction event, can be seen today in the shape of a 180-kilometre-diameter impact crater at modern-day Chicxulub, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

The trio of researchers – William Bottke and David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, U.S. and David Vokrouhlicky of the Czech Republic's Charles University in Prague – took their theory a stage further and checked out sediment samples from the Chicxulub site. They found traces of a mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which is only found in a tiny minority of meteorites, as the Earthly remains of plummeting asteroids are called. Most asteroids can be excluded from the Chicxulub event, but not Baptistina-era ones, they contend.

Putting simulation and chemical evidence together, the team rule out theories that a comet was to blame rather than an asteroid, and say there is a "more than 90 per cent" probability that the killer rock was a refugee from the Baptistina family.

The investigators also argue that there's a 70 per cent chance that a four-kilometre-wide Baptistina asteroid hit the Moon some around 108 million years ago, forming the 85-kilometre crater Tycho.

An important point raised by the study "is how severe the repercussions of cataclysmic collisions in the asteroid belt can be for the Earth–Moon system," commented geologists Philippe Claeys and Steven Goderis of Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium, in an accompanying commentary also in Nature.

"The terrestrial impact record needs to be scrutinized more closely to identify and understand these periods of more intense bombardment, and to link them to the huge and dangerous game of billiards continuously being played out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter," they said.

Science Photo Library

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Dinos and World Systems Theory

In the World Systems Theory of political economy, the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstien claims that capitalism evolved coincidentally with the decline of feudalism, it did not suddenly replace that political economic system but rather evolved out of it. It was not the only political economic system evolving at the time but the one that became dominate.

This can be proven with a simple example, a robber baron newspaper owner who sells his national citizenship in order to buy a lordship from Baronial Britain. Here we have someone who is a capitalist aspiring to the titles and honorifics of the old feudal order.

Now we find the same thing happened with proto-dinosaurs and their later dinosaur relatives. The dinos did not wipe out their earlier relatives but co existed with them. Much like the remnants of feudalism, Lords, Queens and Kings, autarchies, exist today under capitalism.,

UC Berkeley scientists, digging deep into a remote New Mexico hillside, have discovered a trove of fossil bones that they say is evidence that dinosaurs and their early relatives lived side by side for tens of millions of years before the relatives slowly died off and left the dinosaurs to dominate the ancient world.

Until now many scientists had thought that dinosaur "precursors" -- perhaps their ancestors -- disappeared suddenly long before the dinosaurs themselves rose to prominence, but the bones dug up by Berkeley paleontologists show evidence of a different story.

The discovery of a wide variety of creatures all mingled together in layer upon layer of rocks dating from Earth's late Triassic period between 235 million and 200 million years ago, they say, shows that the strange relatives of the dinosaurs remained on the scene while the dinosaurs evolved into truly dominant creatures during the Jurassic period, between 120 million and 200 million years ago.

Until now, many scientists have argued that the early close relatives of dinosaurs must have disappeared abruptly in an early "mass extinction" about 215 million years ago that has never been clearly explained. Others have thought that the true dinosaurs, whether carnivores or plant eaters, simply outcompeted their relatives for dominance in the ancient environment and quickly drove them to extinction.

And after all economists call themselves scientists. Of course like its prehistoric ancestor Capitalism itself is a dinosaur. And those who believe that Capitalism is, was, and will always be eternal are to political economy what creationists are to paleontology.



See:

Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Marx For Beginners

Saving Capitalism From Itself

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Paleontologist Versus Paleo-Conservatives

I found this interesting post on Marie Stopes the mother of the British and Canadian birth control/planned parenthood movements.

Shh don't tell the Conservatives this is on the governments Natural Resources site or it might disappear.

Of course being a paleontologist she would be well steeled for dealing with controversy from the religious right. In todays world her profession as a paleontologist would give her a leg up on confronting the paleo-conservatives.

Past lives: Chronicles of Canadian Paleontology

Marie Stopes: paleobotanist at St. John

It is not often that the Geological Survey of Canada considers it necessary to hire a foreign expert to adjudicate a local paleontological matter. In 1911 Marie Stopes was brought in as a hired gun to check the paleobotanical work of Sir William Dawson in St. John, New Brunswick

Marie Stopes, in a romantic pose looking like the Lady of Shalott, aged 30, about the time she worked on the Fern Ledges fossils. (From Ruth Hall's book - Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes.)

In 1940, a Mr. J.F. Coates, M.P. from New South Wales gave a speech in the Australian Parliament that included this statement: "The Empire today has three enemies -- all from Munich. One is Hitler, the other Goebbels, and the third that doctor of German philosophy and science -- Dr. Marie Stopes. The greatest of these is Marie Stopes". Why such enmity? Her German doctorate was in the field of paleobotany -- not usually a field that provokes vitriolic hate. But Stopes was also the author of the first sex manuals, Married Love and Wise Parenthood, and an active promoter of birth control who established Britain's first family planning clinics in 1921. The Marie Stopes International now provides reproductive health services in over thirty countries and, in 1999, she came first in the Guardian's "Women of the Millennium" poll.

But our interest here is not primarily with Marie Stopes, the birth control promoter; it is with Marie Stopes, the paleobotanist, who in 1911 was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to settle a vexing controversy about the age of plant fossils at "Fern Ledges" near St. John, New Brunswick. With a Ph.D from Munich and a D.Sc. from London, this 30-year-old lecturer in botany at the University of Manchester, and the author of Ancient Plants, was well qualified for this task.

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