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 A new species of bristle worm that lived about 508 million years ago (Cambrian period) has been identified from fossils found in Marble Canyon and Burgess Shale sites, both in British Columbia, Canada.

Dubbed Kootenayscolex barbarensis, the ancient worm was a type of annelid, a highly diverse group of animals that includes modern-day leeches and earthworms.

“While the diversity of annelids in terms of their anatomies and lifestyles makes them ecologically important and an evolutionarily interesting group to study, it also makes it difficult to piece together what the ancestral annelid may have looked like,” said Karma Nanglu, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and a researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Although annelids are found all over the world — from the bottoms of oceans and lakes to mountain glaciers — their early evolutionary history is confounded by a poor fossil record, with few species described from well-preserved body fossils near the evolutionary origins of the group.

“While isolated pieces of annelid jaws and some mineralized tubes secreted by the animals are well known, preservation of their soft tissues is exceedingly rare,” said Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron, also from the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum.

“You need to look to truly exceptional fossil deposits like those found in the Burgess Shale to find well-preserved body fossils. Even then, they’re quite uncommon and many of the currently described species there are still poorly understood.”

Kootenayscolex barbarensis was up to 1.2 inches (3 cm) long and had hair-sized bristles on the head.

“The worm possessed paired bundles of hair-sized bristles spread along the body,” Nanglu said.

“This is one of the diagnostic features of this group of animals.”

“However, unlike any living forms, these bristles were also partially covering the head, more specifically surrounding the mouth.”

“The new species seems to suggest that the annelid head evolved from posterior body segments which had pair bundles of bristles, a hypothesis supported by the developmental biology of many modern annelid species.”

“The fine anatomical details preserved in Kootenayscolex barbarensis allow us to infer not only its evolutionary position, but also its lifestyle,” Nanglu added.

“Sediment preserved inside their guts suggests that, much as their relatives do in modern ecosystems, these worms served an important role in the food chain by recycling organic material from the sediment back to other animals that preyed on them.”

The findings are published in the January 22 edition of the journal Current Biology.

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Karma Nanglu & Jean-Bernard Caron. 2018. A New Burgess Shale Polychaete and the Origin of the Annelid Head Revisited. Current Biology 28 (2): 319-326; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.019

Source: www.sci-news.com

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN

The treasury of Niue have issued (9th January) a new silver crown coin which is in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the release of the Hollywood blockbuster film Jurassic Park — a science fiction film which summarised what the ramifications would be on Earth if prehistoric dinosaurs were to come back to life. Directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg, the movie was released in June 1993 and became an immediate hit with moviegoers and audiences worldwide.

The storyline follows the travels of paleontologists Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and mathematician Ian Malcolm who are among a select group chosen to tour an island theme park populated by dinosaurs that were created (or brought back to life) from prehistoric DNA. While the park’s mastermind, billionaire John Hammond, assures everyone that the facility is safe, they find out otherwise when various ferocious predators break free and go on the hunt. The franchise of Jurassic Park resulted in an array of promotional merchandise — including an actual park themed on the film’s premise.

Known as the Palmersaurus Dinosaur Park in Queensland, Australia, it was home to 160 animatronic dinosaurs that moved, blinked, roared, and looked very much like dinosaurs. Three more Jurassic Park sequels followed, with the latest chapter entitled Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is scheduled to be released on the 7th June 2018, in the United Kingdom and on the 22nd June 2018, in the United States.

The coin is produced by the New Zealand Mint at their facilities in Auckland on behalf of the treasury of Niue. The reverse design features the highly memorable Jurassic Park logo and is licensed by Universal Studios. For dramatic effect, the coin is Antiqued and includes both a colour application and engraving.

The obverse includes the Ian Rank-Broadley effigy of HM Queen Elizabeth II with the denomination of TWO DOLLARS and the year of issue 2018 — the latter of which is placed below the Queen’s portrait.

Source: http://news.coinupdate.com

A fight in the Utah Legislature over what should be named the state fossil has been avoided with the introduction of an official state dinosaur.

State Sen. Curt Bramble will end his push to have the Utahraptor replace the Allosaurus as the state fossil, and he plans to introduce legislation to name the Utahraptor as the new state dinosaur.

The Republican senator says paleontologists made cases for both dinosaurs and suggested the establishment of a state dinosaur.

Bramble introduced a bill to change the state fossil after 10-year-old dinosaur fanatic Kenyon Roberts proposed the Utahraptor as a replacement.

State Paleontologist James Kirkland discovered the Utahraptor near Arches National Park in 1990. Kirkland with Robert Gaston and Donald Burge named it in 1993.

Source: http://upr.org - AP

Moroccan authorities have opened an inquiry into the origins of a dinosaur tail from the North African country sold at auction in Mexico, the culture ministry said Saturday.

The four-metre-long (13-foot) fragment of an "Atlasaurus tail from the Jurassic period" was sold on Tuesday for 1.8 million pesos ($96,000), according to Mexican auctions website Morton.

It said the fossil came from the Atlas mountains in Morocco after which the dinosaur is named.

Abdellah Alaoui, the head of Morocco's cultural heritage department, said Rabat would seek to enforce international conventions against trafficking of items of cultural heritage.

The skeleton of an Atlasaurus, a species which dates back 160 million years and is estimated to have measured 18 metres in length and 10 metres in height, is on display at the natural history museum in the Moroccan capital Rabat.

Last April, Morocco secured the return of the bones of an aquatic dinosaur which was withdrawn from an auction in Paris.

With its land mass partly submerged by the sea around 500 million years ago, Morocco is rich in palaeontological treasures, minerals and space rocks.

Source: https://phys.org

Researchers have found the fossil of a dinosaur in the Sahara Desert, which could help explain the evolution of the animals in the continent.

Scientists have unearthed in a Sahara Desert oasis in Egypt fossils of a long-necked, four-legged, school bus-sized dinosaur that lived roughly 80 million years ago, a discovery that sheds light on a mysterious time period in the history of dinosaurs in Africa.

Researchers said on Monday the plant-eating Cretaceous Period dinosaur, named Mansourasaurus shahinae, was nearly 33 feet (10 meters) long and weighed 5.5 tons (5,500 kg) and was a member of a group called titanosaurs that included Earth’s largest-ever land animals. Like many titanosaurs, Mansourasaurus boasted bony plates called osteoderms embedded in its skin.

Mansourasaurus, which lived near the shore of the ancient ocean that preceded the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the very few dinosaurs known from the last 15 million years of the Mesozoic Era, or age of dinosaurs, on mainland Africa. Madagascar had a separate geologic history.

Its remains, found at the Dakhla Oasis in central Egypt, are the most complete of any mainland African land vertebrate during an even larger time span, the roughly 30 million years before the dinosaur mass extinction 66 million years ago, said paleontologist Hesham Sallam of Egypt’s Mansoura University, who led the study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The scientists recovered parts of its skull, lower jaw, neck and back vertebrae, ribs, shoulder and forelimb, back foot and osteoderms. A lot of Africa is covered in grasslands, savannas and rain forests that obscure underlying rock where fossils may be found, said postdoctoral researcher Eric Gorscak of the Field Museum in Chicago, who was formerly at Ohio University.

While as massive as a bull African elephant, Mansourasaurus was modestly sized next to titanosaur cousins such as South America’s Argentinosaurus, Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan and Africa’s Paralititan, some exceeding 100 feet (30 meters) long.

“Mansourasaurus, though a big animal by today’s standards, was a pipsqueak compared to some other titanosaurs,” said paleontologist Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

The researchers determined Mansourasaurus was more closely related to European and Asian titanosaurs than to those from elsewhere in Africa and other Southern Hemisphere land masses including South America formerly joined in a super-continent called Gondwana.

“This, in turn, demonstrates for the first time that at least some dinosaurs could move between North Africa and southern Europe at the end of the Mesozoic, and runs counter to long-standing hypotheses that have argued that Africa’s dinosaur faunas were isolated from others during this time,” Lamanna said.

By: Reuters

The fossil park in Balasinor had revealed fossils of Rajasaurus Narmadensis, a carnivorous species of the Cretaceous period which exists in the Narmada region about 65 million years ago.

Balasinor in Mahisagar district is already home one of the world’s largest dinosaur hatcheries in Raiyoli. Now, locals have discovered another possible egg of a dinosaur in Muwada village, about 10 kms away. The egg was found on Saturday evening during a digging exercise at a local site in the village and caused much excitement among the locals. The one dinosaur egg found in Mahisagar District is however broken and not an intact piece.

The villagers handed over the egg to the local Mamlatdar, who will now send it across to the Geological Survey of India department, where a laboratory test will finalize if the egg indeed belongs to the extinct species of the world’s largest living being.

On Sunday, Aaliya Sultana Babi, who is the scion of the Balasinor royal family and has been an advocate in the conservation of the Raiyoli fossil park, visited the site to take stock of the new discovery.

Babi, who has been closely working with the GSI, state tourism department and palaeontologists of the world to promote and preserve the dinosaur park in her backyard, said, “It was just one egg that was discovered by some labourers on Saturday evening while they were digging rocks probably for the foundation of a house. It’s probably a sauropod egg (herbivore).”

The fossil park in Balasinor had revealed fossils of Rajasaurus Narmadensis, a carnivorous species of the Cretaceous period which exists in the Narmada region about 65 million years ago.

When contacted, an official of the local district of administration said that the egg is in the possession of the district administration and will be handed over to the GSI for further study in the subject.

Source: http://indianexpress.com

Dinosaurs that lived in what is now known as Victoria more than 120 million years ago would have dealt with prolonged periods of darkness and below freezing temperatures, a new study reveals.

The study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, examines the bone tissue microstructure of plant-eating “hypsilophodontid” dinosaurs known to have lived in the Antarctic Circle - now Victoria, Australia. 

“These little dinosaurs would have dealt with prolonged periods of darkness and mean annual temperatures near freezing, and certainly below freezing in the winter,” says one of the study authors, Dr Patricia Vickers-Rich, a professor of paleobiology at Swinburne.

In studying fossils from seventeen individuals, the International research team from Swinburne University of Technology, Oklahoma State University, Museums Victoria, and Monash University produced the first life history reconstructions for these small Australian polar dinosaurs.

Examining bone microstructure
An examination of the bone microstructure, or histology, of the hypsilophodontid fossils revealed many characteristics of their growth.

Rings in the bone, similar in appearance to tree rings, helped determine individual age. Bone fibre orientation, blood vessel density, and the amount of bone between growth rings, was used to determine annual growth rates.

Bone histology revealed that, in general, growth was most rapid during the first three years of life, and the dinosaurs were fully grown – the size of a medium wallaby or average turkey - in five to seven years.

Uncovering Australia’s past

The hypsilophodontid samples were recovered from two Australian localities along the south Victorian coast stretching from west of Cape Otway to Inverloch, geologically separated by about 12 million years.

However, the trend of rapid growth for three years followed by adult body size between five and seven years, was conserved across the two samples.

“Given the geologic time involved, we may be looking at several polar dinosaur species in this sample, but their growth trajectories are so similar that we cannot differentiate them from one another based on their growth patterns and rates alone,” says Holly Woodward (Oklahoma State University).

“Instead, our life history assessment demonstrates to us that this generalised growth trajectory was a successful lifestyle for surviving in a region experiencing unique conditions.”

Histologic examinations

The tibia (shin-bone) of one hypsilophodontid individual in the sample had clearly suffered from a pathologic condition known as osteomyelitis or bone infection.

Microscopic examination revealed the cause of this pathology was most likely a broken bone, which then became infected. Counting the growth rings preserved in this tibia prior to the formation of the pathologic bone, the team was able to place the timing of the injury as having occurred when this individual was approximately four years old. 

The team was also able to tease out how long this little dinosaur lived and how it dealt with the injury: histologic examination of the unaffected femur (thigh bone) of this individual shows that it survived with the injury and pathology for three more years.

”Further investigations of this unique sample will continue to shed light on how these little dinosaurs thrived in high latitudes and under the most stressful of environments during a time when dinosaurs flourished on planet Earth,” Dr Vickers-Rich says.

Source: www.swinburne.edu.au

Sir David Attenborough will officially open the Yorkshire Museum’s major new exhibition Yorkshire’s Jurassic World on Friday March 23.

The 91 year old naturalist and television presenter will take a guided tour of the exhibition which looks at the changing landscapes of Jurassic Yorkshire and the huge creatures which inhabited them.

York school children will be given the chance to meet him through a competition and pairs of tickets to the opening will be given to lucky YMT Card holders.

Sir David Attenborough said:

“I am delighted to be coming to York to open Yorkshire’s Jurassic World. I have been interested in palaeontology and the world of dinosaurs and sea dragons since I was a child. It remains a subject which still fascinates and excites me to this day.

“I am looking forward to coming to see the internationally significant collections and also to experience the technology which is helping to bring these magnificent creatures to life in new and imaginative ways. I am also looking forward to meeting school children from York and hearing their opinions and questions on the natural world.”

Reyahn King, chief executive of York Museums Trust, said:

“We are thrilled that Sir David Attenborough is able to join us for the opening of Yorkshire’s Jurassic World. His expertise and passion for natural history and in particular palaeontology is unparalleled and we feel extremely fortunate that he is coming to share this with us at the opening of a very special exhibition.

“We are also delighted he will also be using his unique abilities to communicate the wonders of the natural world to York school children, who will have the chance to meet him and ask questions.”

Sir David Attenborough will visit on Friday March 23, with the exhibition opening to the public on Saturday March 24.

The question and answer discussion will take place in the Tempest Anderson Hall at the Yorkshire Museum. York school children will be asked to submit questions about the natural world and Sir David Attenborough’s career to York Museums Trust, with the winners being chosen to come and ask in person.

Source: www.minsterfm.com

The biggest discoveries can be made by the unlikeliest of scientists, like a volunteer sifting through desert rocks.

Paleontologists at Dinosaur Journey say that's exactly how the oldest known fossil found in Utah was unearthed.

We got a sneak peek at the hip bone of the dinosaur.

Rob Gay says a little more than 10 years ago, a group outing turned up the fossil that's more than 200 million years old. To put that into perspective, that means the fossil is from the very beginning of dinosaur time.

"And then we looked at this fossil, specifically and compared it to known dinosaurs from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and of course across the American West at this same time period. And we found it shares a lot of characteristics with a group of early predatory dinosaurs called Neotherapods," said Rob Gay, Paleontologist, Colorado Canyons Association.

When it was alive the dinosaur would have been about nine to 12 feet long and stood waist high at its head and had pointy teeth. Gay says it would have been like a prehistoric coyote.