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There have been few films in history that have had the lasting power that Jurassic Park did. Couple that with successful subsequent sequels, and this franchise is one of the highest regarded and enjoyed in cinematic history. Of course, even now, nearly 25 years after the original film was released to audiences, there is still a lot that adoring fans do not know about the entire franchise as whole. Here you will be introduced to 20 facts you likely didn’t know about the franchise, which is sure to move you up the chain towards being one of the biggest film dinosaur buffs on the planet.

The Roar of T. rex Was Several Animal Sounds Combined And Modified

While there were obviously no recorded versions of the Tyrannosaurus Rex to reference for a roar, Spielberg and company needed to get creative about what would be an iconic sound for film history. In a condensed version of this process, sound engineers mixed the squeal of a baby elephant, the snarl of a tiger and the gurgling of an alligator. This is part of the process that engineers are forced to do with so many films, to create iconic sounds from the unlikeliest of places. A lot of time was spent with perfectly blending these sounds, slowing them down to dramatic levels or speeding them up as needed to create the infamous declaration of film’s most terrifying dinosaur. While it is believed that the actual roar of the T-Rex sounded nothing like Jurassic Park’s creation, it was still a great result that really fit the creature created for the movie.

Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago.

The research by lead author Cédric Aria, recent graduate of the PhD program in the department of ecology & evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T, and co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the ROM and an associate professor in the departments of ecology & evolutionary biology and Earth sciences at U of T, is published today in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

Approximately 2 cm in length with a tail as long as the rest of its body, the long-extinct Habelia optata belongs to the group of invertebrate animals called arthropods, which also includes such familiar creatures as spiders, insects, lobsters and crabs. It lived during the middle Cambrian period approximately 508 million years ago and comes from the renowned Burgess Shale fossil deposit in British Columbia. Habelia optata was part of the “Cambrian explosion,” a period of rapid evolutionary change when most major animal groups first emerged in the fossil record.

Like all arthropods, Habelia optata features a segmented body with external skeleton and jointed limbs. What remained unclear for decades, however, was the main sub-group of arthropods to which Habelia belonged. Early studies had mentioned mandibulates—a hyperdiverse lineage whose members possess antennae and a pair of specialized appendages known as mandibles, usually used to grasp, squeeze and crush their food. But Habelia was later left as one of the typically unresolved arthropods of the Burgess Shale.

The new analysis by the U of T-ROM researchers suggests that Habelia optata was instead a close relative of the ancestor of all chelicerates, the other sub-group of arthropods living today, named for the presence of appendages called chelicerae in front of the mouth and used to cut food. This is mostly due to the overall anatomy of the head in Habelia, and the presence of two small chelicerae-like appendages revealed in these fossils.

“Habelia now shows in great detail the body architecture from which chelicerates emerged, which allows us to solve some long-standing questions,” said Aria, who is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, in China. “We can now explain why, for instance, horseshoe crabs have a reduced pair of limbs – the chilaria – at the back of their heads. Those are relics of fully-formed appendages, as chelicerates seem to originally have had heads with no less than seven pairs of limbs.”

Aria and Caron analyzed 41 specimens in total, the majority of which are new specimens acquired by ROM-led fieldwork parties to the Burgess Shale.

The research illustrates that the well-armoured body of Habelia optata, covered in a multitude of different spines, was divided into head, thorax and post-thorax, all bearing different types of appendages. The thorax displays five pairs of walking legs, while the post-thorax houses rounded appendages likely used in respiration.

“Scorpions and the now-extinct sea scorpions are also chelicerates with bodies divided into three distinct regions,” Aria explained. “We think that these regions broadly correspond to those of Habelia. But a major difference is that scorpions and sea scorpions, like all chelicerates, literally ‘walk on their heads,’ while Habelia still had walking appendages in its thorax.”

The researchers argue that this difference in anatomy allowed Habelia to evolve an especially complex head that makes this fossil species even more peculiar compared to known chelicerates. The head of Habelia contained a series of five appendages made of a large plate with teeth for mastication, a leg-like branch with stiff bristle-like spines for grasping, and an elongate, slender branch modified as a sensory or tactile appendage.

“This complex apparatus of appendages and jaws made Habelia an exceptionally fierce predator for its size,” said Aria. “It was likely both very mobile and efficient in tearing apart its preys.”

The surprising outcome of this study, despite the evolutionary relationship of Habelia with chelicerates, is that these unusual characteristics led instead the researchers to compare the head of Habelia with that of mandibulates from a functional perspective. Thus, the peculiar sensory branches may have been used in a similar fashion as mandibulates use antennae. Also, the overlapping plate-like appendages in the middle series of five are shown to open and close parallel to the underside of the head—much as they do in mandibulates, especially those that feed on animals with hardened carapaces.

Lastly, a seventh pair of appendages at the back of the head seems to have fulfilled a function similar to that of “maxillipeds”—appendages in mandibulates that assist with the other head limbs in the processing of food. This broad correspondence in function rather than in evolutionary origin is called “convergence.”

“From an evolutionary point of view, Habelia is close to the point of divergence between chelicerates and mandibulates,” Aria said. “But its similarities with mandibulates are secondary modifications of features that were in part already chelicerate in nature. This suggests that chelicerates originated from species with a high structural variability.”

The researchers conclude from the outstanding head structure, as well as from well-developed walking legs, that Habelia optata and its relatives were active predators of the Cambrian sea floors, hunting for small shelly sea creatures, such as small trilobites—arthropods with hard, mineralized exoskeletons that were already very diverse and abundant during Cambrian times.

“This builds onto the importance of carapaces and shells for evolutionary change during the Cambrian explosion, and expands our understanding of ecosystems at this time, showing another level of predator-prey relationship and its determining impact on the rise of arthropods as we know them today,” said Caron, who was Aria’s PhD supervisor when the bulk of this research was completed.

“The appearance and spread of animals with shells are considered to be one of the defining characteristics of the Cambrian explosion, and Habelia contributes to illustrate how important this ecological factor was for the early diversification of chelicerates and arthropods in general.”

The findings are described in the study “Mandibulate convergence in an armoured Cambrian stem chelicerate,” where Habelia optata is brought to life by visual artist and scientific illustrator Joanna Liang with animations depicting the spectacular body architecture and complex feeding mechanism of this fossil. Liang collaborated with Aria and Caron to produce the animations as part of her master of science thesis in biomedical communications at U of T under supervisor Dave Mazierski.

More information: Cédric Aria et al, Mandibulate convergence in an armored Cambrian stem chelicerate, BMC Evolutionary Biology (2017). DOI: 10.1186/s12862-017-1088-7

Source: phys.org

A detailed analysis of 3.465-billion-year-old microbial microfossils provides evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the Universe is common.

Professor J. William Schopf from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues analyzed 11 specimens of 5 species of prokaryotic cellular microfossils from the Apex Basalt Formation, Pilbara Craton, Western Australia.

Two of the five species the researchers studied were primitive photosynthesizers, one was an Archaeal methane producer, and two others were methane consumers.

“The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history strengthens the case for life existing elsewhere in the Universe because it would be extremely unlikely that life formed quickly on Earth but did not arise anywhere else,” they said.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the most detailed ever conducted on microorganisms preserved in such ancient fossils.

“By 3.465 billion years ago, life was already diverse on Earth; that’s clear — primitive photosynthesizers, methane producers, methane users,” Professor Schopf said.

“These are the first data that show the very diverse organisms at that time in Earth’s history, and our previous research has shown that there were sulfur users 3.4 billion years ago as well.”

“This tells us life had to have begun substantially earlier and it confirms that it was not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms.”

“Scientists still do not know how much earlier life might have begun. But, if the conditions are right, it looks like life in the Universe should be widespread.”

Professor Schopf and co-authors analyzed the Apex specimens with cutting-edge technology called secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS), which reveals the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes — information scientists can use to determine how the microorganisms lived.

They used a secondary ion mass spectrometer — one of just a few in the world — to separate the carbon from each fossil into its constituent isotopes and determine their ratios.

“The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes. Their carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function,” said co-author Professor John Valley, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“The fossils were formed at a time when there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere,” Professor Schopf added.

“I think that advanced photosynthesis had not yet evolved, and that oxygen first appeared on Earth approximately half a billion years later before its concentration in our atmosphere increased rapidly starting about 2 billion years ago.”

“Oxygen would have been poisonous to these microorganisms, and would have killed them,” the scientist said.

Primitive photosynthesizers are fairly rare on Earth today because they exist only in places where there is light but no oxygen — normally there is abundant oxygen anywhere there is light.

And the existence of the rocks the team analyzed is also rather remarkable.

“The average lifetime of a rock exposed on the surface of the Earth is about 200 million years,” Professor Schopf noted.

“When I began my career, there was no fossil evidence of life dating back farther than 500 million years ago. The rocks we studied are about as far back as rocks go.”

“While the study strongly suggests the presence of primitive life forms throughout the Universe, the presence of more advanced life is very possible but less certain,” he said.

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J. William Schopf et al. SIMS analyses of the oldest known assemblage of microfossils document their taxon-correlated carbon isotope compositions. PNAS, published online December 18, 2017; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1718063115

Source: sci-news.com

The Academy Award-winning composer has also shared his excitement on working with director JA Bayona.

“Dinosaurs eat man… woman inherits the earth.”

A few weeks back, it was alleged that the great Sam Neill could be returning to Jurassic Park as Dr. Alan Grant in J. A. Bayona‘s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Now, Jurassic Park co-star Laura Dern is teasing a potential reunion in the J. A. Bayona-directed Jurassic World sequel.

“[It] could be fun,” she teased with all but a wink.

“I mean, I love Ellie Sattler.”

Could the entire Jurassic Park gang be getting back together in Jurassic World 2? We already know for sure that Jeff Goldblum is set to reprise his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm in the upcoming sequel, which is set for release on June 22, 2018. There are also rumors floating around that suggest Sam Neill could be making a return as Alan Grant. So, all we need is Laura Dern to come back as Ellie Sattler. Now, Laura Dern has hinted that a cameo could be in store for her character next summer.

Laura Dern was recently promoting her movie Downsizing, which hits theaters next week. She’s also currently in the biggest movie on the planet, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. So things are going pretty well for her. When asked about possibly revisiting her most iconic role in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom next summer, she wouldn’t come anywhere near denying it. Her reaction was everything.

As much as I love Chris Pratt, I’d love to see Goldblum, Neill, and Dern as the central character in the film, even if it’s in the third film in the planned trilogy.

Life finds a way on June 22, 2018.

It took more than 10 years of painstaking work, grinding an Australian rock containing fossils smaller than the eye could see, to confirm the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth, scientists said Monday.

The 3.5-billion-year-old fossils – many narrower than a human hair – are described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

Other teams of scientists have reported even earlier signs of fossil life, going back 3.95 billion years.

But those studies are based on either an apparent shape of a microfossil, or a chemical trace – not both.

“None of these studies are regarded as proof of life,” lead author John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told AFP.

“This is the first, oldest place where we have both morphology and the chemical fingerprint of life.”

Eleven kinds of microbes, preserved in both their cylindrical or snake-like structures, are preserved in the rock.

Some of the bacteria are now extinct, while others are similar to contemporary microbes.

The tiny fossils were found in 1982 from the Apex chert deposit of Western Australia.

Two scientific papers were published on the rock’s apparent microbial contents – one in 1993 and another in 2002.

But critics raised questions, suggesting instead they were not life but odd minerals that merely looked like biological specimens.

So Valley and his fellow researchers spent a decade developing a technique to tease apart the contents of the fossils.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison modified a tool, called a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS), to grind down the original sample one micrometer at a time, without destroying the fossils which were “suspended at different levels within the rock and encased in a hard layer of quartz,” said the report.

“Each microfossil is about 10 micrometers wide; eight of them could fit along the width of a human hair.”

The technique allowed scientists to detect ratios of carbon-12 from the carbon-13 within each fossil, and compare them to a section of the rock which had no fossils.

“The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” Valley explained.

“If they’re not biological there is no reason for such a correlation.”

Some of the microbial life inside is believed to have relied on the Sun to produce energy, while others consumed methane, which was a big part of Earth’s early atmosphere before oxygen.

“This was a well-developed microbial community,” Valley said.

The hunt for the first evidence of life is all-consuming for some scientists, eager to pinpoint the earliest signs after the Earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago.

Microbial life likely began as far back as 4.3 billion years ago, said co-author William Schopf, professor of paleobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The existence of several different kinds of microbes 3.5 billion years ago shows that “life had to have begun substantially earlier – nobody knows how much earlier – and confirms it is not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms,” he said.

A separate study published in September in the journal Nature said researchers had found 3.95 billion-year-old chemical traces of life in Canadian rocks.

However, that study – which proclaimed the oldest evidence of life on Earth – also raised skepticism.

One of those critics, Martin Whitehouse, a geologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, said the PNAS report appears to be “a sound study.”

“Regarding the Canadian study, the main differences are (a) these new findings are actual fossils preserving morphology, not just blobs of graphite,” he told AFP in an email.

“And (b) the geochronological interpretation of the Canadian example is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed, whereas here the dating is unambiguous.”

Researchers hope their technique can one day be applied to other microfossils, perhaps even those that come from cosmic bodies beyond Earth.

https://tribune.com.pk

An international team of paleontologists has found the remains of an unusual prehistoric bear that lived 3.5 million years ago (Pliocene epoch) in Canada’s High Arctic.

The High Arctic bear is a close relative of the ancestor of modern bears. It represents an ursine bear (all living bears plus their ancestors, except the giant panda) species called Protarctos abstrusus.

The animal was the size of an Asian black bear and slightly smaller than an American black bear, with a flatter head and a combination of primitive and advanced dental characters.

“This is evidence of the most northerly record for primitive bears, and provides an idea of what the ancestor of modern bears may have looked like,” said team member Dr. Xiaoming Wang, from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Protarctos abstrusus was previously known only from a tooth found in Idaho, but Dr. Wang and colleagues found the skull, jaws, teeth and parts of the skeleton from two individuals.

“The skeletal remains of Protarctos abstrusus were collected in different years (1992-2006) from the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic,” the paleontologists explained.

The fossil bear lived in a northern boreal-type forest habitat, where there would have been 24-hour darkness in winter, as well as about six months of ice and snow.

“Modern bears are wide-ranging, found from equatorial to polar regions. Their ancestors, mainly found in Eurasia, date to about 5 million years ago,” the researchers said.

“The new fossil represents one of the early immigrations from Asia to North America but it is probably not a direct ancestor to the modern American black bear.”

Of further significance is that the teeth of both Protarctos abstrusus individuals show signs of dental cavities.

“Dental evidence from Protarctos abstrusus appears to be from two individuals, including an apparent young adult, and both show dental caries, suggesting their diets included high amounts of fermentable carbohydrates early in their lives,” the authors explained.

“Simple sugars, such as glucose and fructose, are readily metabolized by many bacteria found in the oral biofilm into various acids. These acids demineralize enamel and dentin and may lead to dental caries.”

“This is the first and earliest documented occurrence of high-calorie diet in basal bears, likely related to fat storage in preparation for the harsh Arctic winters,” Dr. Wang said.

“We know that modern bears consume sugary fruits in the fall to promote fat accumulation that allows for winter survival via hibernation,” added team member Dr. Natalia Rybczynski, a paleontologist fro mthe Canadian Museum of Nature.

“The dental cavities in Protarctos abstrusus suggest that consumption of sugar-rich foods like berries, in preparation for winter hibernation, developed early in the evolution of bears as a survival strategy.”

The team’s findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

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Xiaoming Wang et al. 2017. A basal ursine bear (Protarctos abstrusus) from the Pliocene High Arctic reveals Eurasian affinities and a diet rich in fermentable sugars. Scientific Reports 7, article number: 17722; doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17657-8

Source: sci-news.com

SCIENTISTS have discovered a partially-preserved corpse that resembles a "dinosaur" with flesh still on its bones, in India.

As part of the crew digging a subway extension under the streets of Los Angeles, Ashley Leger always keeps her safety gear close by.

When her phone buzzes, she quickly dons a neon vest, hard hat and goggles before climbing deep down into a massive construction site beneath a boulevard east of downtown.

Earth-movers are diverted, and Leger gets on her hands and knees and gently brushes the dirt from a spot pointed out by a member of her team. Her heart beats faster because there’s a chance she’ll uncover what she calls “the big find.”

Leger is a paleontologist who digs for fossils in the middle of a city rather than an open plain or desert. She works for a company contracted by Los Angeles transportation officials to keep paleontologists on hand as workers extend a subway line to the city’s west side.

“They’re making sure that they’re recovering every single fossil that could possibly show up,” Leger says of her team of monitors. “They call me anytime things are large and we need to lead an excavation.”

Since work on the extension began in 2014, fossilized remains have routinely turned up from creatures that roamed the grasslands and forests that covered the region during the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago.

 

They include a partial rabbit jaw, mastodon tooth, camel foreleg, bison vertebrae, and a tooth and ankle bone from a horse.

But the discovery that still makes Leger shake her head in disbelief came about a year ago, shortly after construction began on the project’s second phase. She was at home getting ready for bed when a call came in from one of her monitors.

“It looks big,” he told her.

The next morning, Leger knelt at the site and recognized what appeared to be a partial elephant skull.

It turned out to be much more. After 15 hours of painstaking excavation, the team uncovered an intact skull of a juvenile mammoth.

 

“It’s an absolute dream come true for me,” said Leger, who spent the previous decade at a South Dakota mammoth site with no discoveries even close to the size of the one in Los Angeles. “It’s the one fossil you always want to find in your career.”

California’s stringent environmental laws require scientists to be on hand at certain construction sites.

Paleontologists have staffed all L.A. subway digs beginning in the 1990s, when work started on the city’s inaugural line, said Dave Sotero, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Paying for the paleontologist staff from Cogstone Resource Management is factored into the project’s cost, he said. When scientists are brought in to see what crews might have unearthed, work on the project continues, albeit in a different location.

“Our crews try to be as mindful as possible to help them do their jobs. We get out of their way,” Sotero said, adding that when the mammoth skull was uncovered, construction workers helped deliver it to the mouth of the site.

 

From there, the skull was hauled a mile or so to Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, home to one of America’s most fossil-rich sites.

Assistant curator Dr. Emily Lindsey called it a “pretty remarkable find,” noting that while thousands of dire wolf and saber-toothed cat remains have been uncovered in L.A., there have been only about 30 mammoths.

A few hundred pounds and the size of an easy chair, the skull is especially rare because both tusks were attached. It’s being studied and is available for public viewing inside the museum’s glass-walled Fossil Lab.

With a nod to Hollywood, the 8- to 12-year-old Colombian mammoth was named Hayden, for the actress Hayden Panettiere, featured in the TV series “Nashville” and “Heroes.”

The Cogstone monitor at the construction site had been watching her on television before spotting the speck of bone that turned out to be the intact skull.

 

Similar endeavors have turned up subterranean treasures during digs in other cities.

Workers at a San Diego construction site found fossils including parts of a mammoth and a gray whale and multiple layers of ancient seashells.

Last year, crews working on a development near Boston’s seaport uncovered a 50-foot (15-meter) wooden boat possibly dating as far back as the late 18th century.

Lindsey praised California’s efforts to ensure science and urban development overlap, while bemoaning what bygone treasures may have been lost before the regulations went into place in the early 1970s.

“Most of the past is below the ground, so you’re only going to find it when you dig,” she said. “As the city grows, I’m sure we’ll find more exciting fossil material.”

 

Source: phys.org