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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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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Sudbury And The Dinosaurs

So all those minerals that abound in Sudbury, in particular nickel, were the result of an asteroid impact, in fact a result of 298 Baptistina. The asteroid credited with wiping out the dinosaurs.

Physical and chemical evidence of the 1850 Ma Sudbury impact event in the Baraga Group, Michigan

Peir K. Pufahl, Acadia University, Earth and Environmental Science, Wolfville, Nova Scotia B4P 2R6, Canada; et al. Pages 827-830.

A catastrophic extraterrestrial impact 1850 million years ago produced the Sudbury crater, the second largest known impact site on Earth. Pufahl et al.’s discovery of debris in northern Michigan, USA, produced from this impact has provided new information regarding the nature of this event. A prominent iridium anomaly in impact-generated tsunami deposits containing shocked quartz, spherules, tektites, and accretionary lapilli demonstrate that the extraterrestrial body was a meteorite and not a comet, as previously proposed. The Sudbury event was larger than those responsible for later major extinction events, and may prove important in the evolution of early life on Earth.

Two of the three largest impact craters on Earth have nearly the same size and structure, researchers say, but one was caused by a comet while the other was caused by an asteroid. These surprising results could have implications for where scientists might look for evidence of primitive life on Mars.

Susan Kieffer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research and Doreen Ames of Natural Resources Canada analyzed the structure and stratigraphy of the 65 million-year-old Chicxulub crater in Mexico and the 1.8 billion-year-old Sudbury crater in Canada.

Chicxulub is well preserved, but buried, and can be studied only by geophysical means, remote sensing and at a few distant sites on land where some ejecta is preserved. In contrast, Sudbury has experienced up to 4-6 kilometers of erosion, and is well exposed and highly studied by mining exploration companies because of its rich mineral resources.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, June 21, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) announces that exploration drilling at Creighton, a more than century-old nickel mine near Sudbury, province of Ontario, Canada, is confirming mineralization at depth that has the potential to extend the mine life well into the future and continue its longstanding economic contribution to its wholly-owned subsidiary, CVRD Inco Ltd. (CVRD Inco) Ontario operations.

The Creighton Deep Project, a deep mine exploration program, has the potential to almost double the proven and probable reserves at Creighton from 17 million metric tons grading 3.1% nickel and 2.5% copper to up to 32 million metric tons grading 1.9 to 2.2% nickel and 2 to 2.3% copper.

In operation since 1901, Creighton has delivered a total of 173 million metric tons over its life with an average grade of 1.52% nickel and 1.22% of copper.

Exploration and advanced exploration diamond drilling have shown significant high-grade nickel, copper and platinum group elements (PGE) mineralization between the 2,150 and 3,200 meter levels at the mine.

The exploration program continues, and three exploration stations located 1.5 kilometers have been constructed to support further economic study of the findings to date. These latest stations are excavated further into the footwall beyond current infrastructure, allowing exploration to the 3,200- meter level across the entire strike length of all ore bodies.

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Coral

Two interesting stories appeared this week on coral. The fact they are endangered and that they have been discovered off the Canadian East Coast.

Corals Added To IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species For First Time

"There is a common misconception that marine species are not as vulnerable to extinction as land-based species," said Roger McManus, CI's vice president for marine programs. "However, we increasingly realize that marine biodiversity is also faced with serious environmental threat, and that there is an urgent need to determine the worldwide extent of these pressures to guide marine conservation practice."

"Marine ecosystems are vulnerable to threats at all scales -- globally through climate change, regionally from El Niño events, and locally when over-fishing removes key ecosystem building blocks," said Jane Smart, head of the IUCN Species Program. "We need more effective solutions to manage marine resources in a more sustainable way in light of these increasing threats."

Scientists find trio of coral 'hot spots' off Canada's East Coast

Scientists have for the first time discovered a string of coral 'hot spots' in waters off Canada's East Coast and will use the surprising finds to press global fishing interests to steer clear of areas they say are vital marine habitats.

Canadian researchers, in a study to be released Tuesday, said they found heavy concentrations of about 30 species of coral along a stretch of the seabed that extends from the Hudson Strait off Labrador to the Grand Banks off southern Newfoundland.

Their 40-page report says three main sites serve as sanctuaries for a variety of marine animals, but are being damaged by intense fishing.

"We're recommending an immediate fisheries closure in those areas where coral concentrations can be identified within those hot spots," said Bob Rangeley of the World Wildlife Fund, which released the study.

While large scale trawler fishing is a problem for coral reefs so is offshore oil and gas exploration in countries like the Philippines.

Gov’t Selling Protected Seas to TNCs – Environmental Groups In line with its thrust of attracting foreign investments, the Arroyo government is now opening up the country’s protected seas to oil and gas exploration by transnational corporations.

In our brave new world of genetic modification coral genes have been added to tropical fish.

GlowFish - freshwater zebra fish native to Asia that have been genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins so they glow red, green or yellow. The genes come from a coral and an anemone.

And ancient coral reefs are being studied because of the impact that volcanic global warming had millions of years ago on the extinction of almost all life on earth.

In 1991, scientists reported that the largest known volcanic event in the past 600 million years occurred at the same time as the end-Permian extinction. Magma extruded through coal-rich regions of the Earth's crust and blanketed a region the size of the continental United States with basalt to a depth of up to 6 kilometers. The eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps not only threw ash, debris and toxic gases into the atmosphere but also may have heated the coal and released vast quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Rapid release of these greenhouse gases would have caused the oceans first to become acidic and then to become supersaturated with calcium carbonate. In the July Bulletin, Payne presents evidence that underwater limestone beds around the world eroded at the time of the end-Permian extinction. This finding, coupled with geochemical evidence for changes in the relative abundances of carbon isotopes, strongly suggests an acidic marine environment at the time of the extinction. The rock layers immediately covering this eroded surface include carbonate crystal fans, which indicate oceans supersaturated with calcium carbonate.

More than 90 percent of all marine species disappeared from the Great Bank of Guizhou and other end-Permian fossil formations 250 million years ago. Land plants and animals suffered similar losses. Douglas Erwin, curator of the Paleozoic invertebrates collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has dubbed this event "the greatest biodiversity crisis in the history of life." An unusually long period of time passed before biological diversity began to reappear.

"This end-Permian extinction is beginning to look a whole lot like the world we live in right now," Payne said. "The good news, if there is good news, is that we have not yet released as much carbon into the atmosphere as would be hypothesized for the end-Permian extinction. Whether or not we get there depends largely on future policy decisions and what happens over the next couple of centuries."

Reef communities are a sort of canary in the mineshaft, Payne explained. Today, coral reef health is considered a measure of environmental stability. When stressed by environmental conditions, the algae that inhabit the reef leave, and the reef loses color-and one reason why algae might leave is temperature. For example, when ocean temperatures rise during El Niño years, corals bleach. This type of immediate response to environmental change is hard to track in the geologic record.

The climate change deniers will probably blame El Nino and El Nina for this.

In mid-2007, scientists announced the results of an examination of the geological record of coral reefs in the Caribbean, dating back over 3,000 years.

Using core samples from the coral, these scientists found that – for thousands of years – reefs grew rapidly. But, since about 1980, reef-building has faltered.

Richard Aronson: The kinds of changes that we’ve seen over the last several decades are unprecedented on a scale of at least several thousand years.

That’s Rich Aronson of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. He said that reef cover – the percentage of living coral on a reef – has shrunk from covering about 50 % to 10 % of Caribbean reefs since the late 1970s.

Threats to coral come from water pollution – from destructive fishing with dynamite – from carbon-based greenhouse gases, which can acidify the ocean and stunt coral growth and from warmer ocean waters causing coral bleaching.

Another recent study found a nearly identical trend in the much broader Indo-Pacific region, which contains 75% of the world’s coral reefs.

Canada's Coral Museum on Video.ca

Welcome to Canada's Coral Museum which turned out to be the greatest coldwater coral museum in the entire world. Canada had more coral on our East Coast than 11 Great Barrier Reefs but we destroyed it all in our mindless quest for fishsticks while we blamed seals and handliners for the disaster. Too bad nobody helped and I only run the very sucessful museum for a few months.


See:

Strange Sea Creatures

Climate Catastrophe In Ten Years

They Walk Among Us

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Another Croc

Another crocodile tale, except this monster turned out to be a bearded lizard. And proving once again that so called eye witness testimony is the flimsiest form of evidence, for science or justice.

Of course while relatively small the bearded lizard is commonly called a 'dragon'.

And as usual you can find out more about dragons, sea monsters and die vurm.
on my blog.

Sometimes a crocodile is just a lizard

IAN BAILEY

August 14, 2007

Vancouver -- A reported "15-foot crocodile" that drew a half-dozen police cars to a Vancouver backyard on Sunday night after panicked 911 calls from a resident turned out to fit easily into a shoe-box-sized enclosure when brought before the media yesterday.

Animal-shelter staff were looking after the bearded lizard thought to have wandered away from his owners' home.

"Sometimes they can be hard to handle, and will bite, but this guy's pretty gentle," said Paul Teichroeb, chief licence inspector for the City of Vancouver, holding up the sandy-coloured creature yesterday during a police news conference.

Police say they got a 911 call from a panicky homeowner who claimed there was a five-metre-long crocodile in his back yard.

Six officers were sent in, only to discover a 30-centimetre-long reptile called a bearded lizard.

Chief licence inspector Paul Teichroeb displays Bud a bearded dragon lizard found in a backyard on 14th Avenue.
Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

SEE:

Strange Sea Creatures

I Thought I Saw A Putty Cat

Congo's Ghosts

The Fountain Of Youth

Turning Off The Nile

I Don't Do Mornings

Nessie was an Elephant?

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Godzilla Croc

You know that urban myth about gators in the New York City sewer system....well it ain't New York and it ain't in a sewer and it's a croc not a gator.

A small crocodile called Godzik, or Little Godzilla, which escaped from its cage in southern Ukraine at the end of May, is still at large and apparently enjoying itself, an official said Friday.

The 70-centimetre (two-foot, four-inch) long Nile crocodile, which swam away during a publicity show on a beach on the Sea of Azov, is defying attempts to recapture it.

Dariel Adjiba, of the local office of the emergencies ministry, said the reptile had apparently made its home on an abandoned barge which ran aground in the shallow sea, where it could often be seen sunning itself.

AFP Photo: Close up of a nile crocodile in captivity. A small Nile crocodile called Godzik, or...

Godzik had been with a travelling circus for about a year when it escaped at Maryupol on the northern shore of the inland sea.

In the old days this kind of thing would give rise to the myth of dragons, sea monsters and die vurm.


SEE:

Strange Sea Creatures

I Thought I Saw A Putty Cat

Congo's Ghosts

The Fountain Of Youth

Turning Off The Nile

I Don't Do Mornings

Nessie was an Elephant?

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Die Vurm

Gathering dust for a hundred years; a source for De Vermis Mysteriis

A University of Alberta paleontologist has helped discover the existence of a 95 million-year-old snakelike marine animal, a finding that provides not only the earliest example of limbloss in lizards but the first example of limbloss in an aquatic lizard.

The fossil was originally collected during the 19th Century from a limestone quarry in Slovenia. It then sat at the Natural History Museum in Trieste, Italy for almost 100 years before Caldwell and a colleague found it in 1996 during a trip to Europe. He later connected with Alessandro Palci, then a graduate student in Italy whom he helped supervise, and they worked on the fossil together.

The researchers soon realized the lizard's front limbs were not formed during development. "There was a moment when I said, 'I think we stumbled on a new fossil illustrating some portion of the aquatic process of losing limbs,'" said Caldwell. "There are lots of living lizards that love to lose their forelimbs and then their rearlimbs, but we didn't know it was being done 100 million years ago and we didn't know that it was happening among groups of marine lizards."

Ancient giant serpents were known as worms (vurms, wurms),in Europe. Giant serpents or legless lizards may have existed into the modern age. They are not to be confused with Dragons, which are a different kind of beastie, though they commonly are.

If huge giant things roaming the Scottish hills were not enough, we have also had to contend with huge dragon things too. If you had been around in the 12th century you could have visited the Linton Worm who lived in a hollow outside Jedburgh on Linton Hill in the Scottish Borders (still called Worms Den to this day). The dragon terrorised the country, eating cattle and generally making a nuisance of himself. He was finally dispatched at the point of a peat-coated lance by a courageous - some would say reckless - lad called Sommerville of Larison. There have been no more dragon-sightings since.

Like the Lambton worm which was featured in Bram Stokers Lair of the White Worm. Which was made into a passable bit of gothic horror blasphemy by over the top art house director Ken Russell.

The Nordic saga of the Giant worm plays a role in the popular revolutionary imagination of Wagners Ring Cycle.

Now the Giants have the Hoard and Ring safe-kept by a monstrous Worm in the Gnita- (Neid-) Haide [the Grove of Grudge]. Through the Ring the Nibelungs remain in thraldom, Alberich and all. But the Giants do not understand to use their might; their dullard minds are satisfied with having bound the Nibelungen. So the Worm lies on the Hoard since untold ages, in inert dreadfulness: before the lustre of the new race of Gods the Giants' race fades down and stiffens into impotence; wretched and tricksy, the Nibelungen go their way of fruitless labour. Alberich broods without cease on the means of gaining back the Ring.

In the period around this first prose résumé and the first libretto sketches for the Ring, the years 1848 and 1849, Wagner also wrote several important texts which may shed light on his intentions with the tetralogy. Among them are «Die Wibelungen. Weltgeschichte aus der Sage» (The Wibelungen. World History as told in Saga), which includes several sections on the Nibelungs, «Die Revolution» (The Revolution), «Die Kunst und die Revolution» (Art and Revolution) and «Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft» (The Art-work of the Future), all written in 1849 These works are very likely to have been influenced by the philosopher Feuerbach, whom Wagner is known to have read at that time, and with whose writings stylistically common traits have been found at least in The Wibelungen, by the anarchist Proudhon, whom he probably also read (certainly in Paris in 1849), as well as by the ideas of the socialist thinkers Max Stirner, Mikhael Bakunin and Karl Marx.

A Brief Introduction to Norse Myth

When Ragnarok would come,
the winter would last for three years and would be
extremely bitter. The two giant wolves, Skoll and Hati,
would devour the Sun and Moon whilst starts would fall
from the heavens. The giant worm Nidhogg, which was
gnawing on the roots of the Yggdrasil for the longest of
times, would finally succeed. The root Nidhogg succeeded
in gnawing through was the root that supported Niflheim.
Loki, who had been confined for causing Balder's death
escaped his imprisonment. Loki would rally with the
frost giants and his offspring and would lead them
against the Sons of Mankind and the Gods. Fenrir would
escape the magical Fetter, the Midgard Serpent,
Jormungand, would slither out of the ocean. The Frost
Giants and Mountain Giants would leave their home in
Jotunheim, sailing on a ship known as Naglfar, whilst
their cousins the fire giants would leave their realm
of Fire, Muspelheim.

And Australia has recorded the largest earth worm ever, 13 feet long.

Of course worms are not legless serpents, nor some strange creature out of Tremors. Or out of the sewer in a town in Georgia.

Employees at the Huddle House had been having problems with the restaurant’s drainage line clogging up and when plumbers came by to check on the problem they found that some unknown species of animal had apparently crawled through the city sewer lines toward the Huddle House until it became lodged in the line just short of the outside clean-out plug. When a worker spotted the plug, he grabbed it and began pulling it out. And he pulled and he pulled and he pulled until an eight foot long, white, skinless, eyeless snake-like creature emerged. At first glance, it appeared to be a long grease clog. But closer inspection revealed that its composition was of a meat-like consistency. And it had the makings of a mouth. But, apparently, had no skeletal structure.

Or in the Gobi Desert.

The first time you hear about the Mongolian Death Worm you assume it has to be a joke; it sounds too much like the monster from a B-movie or an especially dire comic book to be true. A five-foot (1.5m) long worm dwelling in the vast and inhospitable expanses of the Gobi Desert, the creature is known to Mongolia’s nomadic tribesmen as the allghoi khorkhoi (sometimes given as allerghoi horhai or olgoj chorchoj) or ‘intestine worm’ for its resemblance to a sort of living cow’s intestine. Apparently red in colour, sometimes described as having darker spots or blotches, and sometimes said to bear spiked projections at both ends, the khorkhoi is reputedly just as dangerous as its alarming appearance would suggest, squirting a lethal corrosive venom at its prey and capable of killing by discharging a deadly electric shock, even at a distance of some feet.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are offering a free documentary, watchable on their website, on the hunt for the fabled "Mongolian Death Worm". In 2005, respected writer-researcher Richard Freeman led a four man team from the CFZ to Mongolia in search of the notorious worm; a fabled reptilian beast said to spit venom and kill its victims with electric blasts. The investigation is documented in "The Lair of the Red Worm", which can be viewed in two parts - Part One and Part Two.

And in this day and age of modern virtual myths you can play a Giant Worm in a PC Game.

Giant worms fascinate us. We loved them in Beetlejuice, we thought they were cool in Dune, and we loved watching them be blown away in Tremors. I've seen giant worms pop up as enemies in games before, most recently in Lost Planet. Death Worm may be the first game, indie or otherwise, that lets us play as the giant beasts though.

SEE

Nessie?

Snakes Alive

Nessies Relative

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Prehistoric Happy Feet

What do you call a five foot penguin?
Whatever it wants to be called.

Peruvian prehistoric penguins were taller than Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito is 4'11" tall. These penguins topped out at 5 feet, and lived during a particularly sweltering time in Earth's history. 36 million years ago Icadyptes salasi plied the waters off the southern coast of Peru.

A prehistoric penguin has been uncovered that - at more than 5ft tall and with a spear-like 7in beak - is the mother of all penguins.

	A giant I salasi skull compared to Peru’s modern Humboldt penguin

The giant birds lived around the equator tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now.

Researchers discovered their fossilised remains in Peru.

Evidence that the giant penguins once marched to South America was found by Dr Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University.

"We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species, but the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years," Dr Clarke said. "The evidence indicates that penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates."

See:

March Of The Penquins to Extinction

it's natures way

Not So Cute Seals

Penquin Empiricism

Morality not from animals

Ted Morton To Outlaw Homosexuality

Brecht Meets Oscar

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