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The new trailer for the upcoming latest chapter of the successful Jurassic Park franchise, with the title Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, reveals what seems to be some basics of the plot. Years after the dream of an adventure park featuring real, cloned dinosaurs, failed again, the survivors go back to the island, where something survived. Other than in the original novel, there was never an attempt to eradicate the loose dinosaurs, so they proliferated over time. This is a biological impossibility, as such a small island could never host so many different dinosaur species, especially predators.

The trailer also features some geological oddities.

Supposedly a rescue mission is organized to save some samples or animals from the abandoned park, as the island is doomed by an impending volcanic eruption. In the novel, it’s mentioned that the park uses geothermal energy to power itself, so building a park on an active volcano was supposedly part of the plan. Also, geologically active areas are far more interesting, featuring a complex landscape with mountains and rivers, so that may have been advantageous for marketing the park. Geological stable areas, like deserts, tend to be smoothed by erosion and thereby far less appealing to our senses.

After the crew arrives, the situation quickly escalates and Owen Grady, actor Chris Pratt’s character in the movie, soon has to run not only from the dinosaurs but also a volcanic eruption. One scene shows a dark cloud rushing down from an exploding mountain, likely a pyroclastic flow. Grady, together with various dinosaurs, manages to stay ahead of the flow and probably also survives.

Pyroclastic flows (also pyroclastic density currents, or PCDs) are avalanches of hot gases, volcanic ash, and boulders, traveling at a speed exceeding in most cases 50 miles per hour. The fastest, professional sprinter can reach 30 miles per hour, but only over a short distance.

It’s impossible to escape a pyroclastic flow if you’re standing or running in its path. Indeed PCDs are among the most lethal volcanic phenomena. A series of pyroclastic flows during the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 killed estimated 20,000-40,000 people. Only three survivors were reported. The young shoemaker Léon Compère-Léandre (1874-1936) managed to escape, his home was located at the border of the city of St. Pierre, where the PCD stopped. Still, he was severely burned. As for the dinosaurs, it’s hard to give estimates for running velocity. Models, based on fossil trackways and dinosaur anatomy, suggest that some, agile species (* there are some unidentified, small dinosaurs seen in the trailer) reached 50 miles per hour. Still barely enough to outrun a PCD under perfect conditions, like plain terrain.

PCDs can travel vast distances, up to 50 miles from the volcano’s crater. From the eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, we know that PCDs are lethal up to six miles from the volcano. The heat is so intense that it instantly burns the outer layers of skin and flesh. A body will shrink due to the loss of water by vaporization, squeezing the inner organs out from the body cavities. Even if not hit directly by the pyroclastic flow, as seen in the trailer, inhaling the still hot gases would burn Grady’s lungs, drowning our hero with his own fluids.

It’s curious to note, that a prehistoric reptile, even if not dinosaur, killed by a PCD is known from the fossil record. Discovered in 1931 by  Gualtiero Adami, an engineer and employee at an Italian Natural History Museum, near the village of Piné (Dolomites), the fossil is today hosted in the museum of the Geological Institute of Padua. The “Tridentinosaurus antiquus” was described by paleontologist Piero Leonardi in 1959, recognizing it’s significance as a vertebrate in peculiar preservation conditions. The skeletal remains are surrounded by a carbonaceous patina and the oldest body fossil found in the Alps, dated to 200 million years. It was suggested by some authors, based on the preservation of the fossil, that the animal was killed during a volcanic eruption, by a pyroclastic flow.

Source: forbes.com

The latest addition to the family tree of masupial lions is considerably more ancient than other members, going extinct roughly 19 million years ago.

I don’t know as anyone knew what to think when Jurassic Park, the first and original, hit the theaters. If you compared the first movie to what’s come out now you might be able to pinpoint certain moments when the dinosaurs didn’t move the same way, how they looked a bit different than what came later, and even more. But if you really nitpick that much then you’re either a critic or someone that lives to find every last little mistake in a movie while claiming to do so because you love it. To each their own and all but the first Jurassic Park that came bounding onto the screen was something of a marvel for many people. The roar of the T. rex over the THX sound system was something I remember vividly since you could hear it another theater over and had to wonder just what was going on. Once you sat your butt down in the theater to watch the movie however you understood just what people had been talking about all that time.

The first Jurassic Park was off the hook. Speaking of which, here are 10 things you might not have known about the film:

10. Between the book and the movie paleontology classes experienced a huge upswing in attendance.

Suddenly everyone wanted to know as much as they could about dinosaurs and what was real vs. what was make-believe.

9. The T-Rex had a few glitches.

When it was left out in the rain it experienced a few technical difficulties such as twitching and jerking as though it was alive. It kind of freaked people out.

Instead of laboriously pushing the water out of the way with their paddles, plesiosaurs glided with limbs modified as underwater wings. They had small heads and long, streamlined necks. Their stout bodies had strong muscles to keep those wings in motion. Compared to other marine reptiles, the tail was short, because it was only used for steering. This evolutionary design was very successful, but curiously, it did not evolve again after the extinction of the plesiosaurs, according to paleontologist Prof. Martin Sander from the Steinmann Institute of Geology, Mineralogy, and Paleontology of the University of Bonn.

The long-extinct paddle saurians could easily have held their own against today’s water animals. Whereas sea turtles mainly use their strong forelimbs for propulsion, the plesiosaurs moved all four limbs together, resulting in powerful thrust. These ancient animals did not have a shell like turtles, however. Plesiosaurs fed on fish. Numerous fossils document a global distribution of the group during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

The private collector Michael Mertens discovered a truly exceptional specimen during quarrying operations in a clay pit in Westphalia, Germany, in 2013. The subsequent evaluation by the LWL-Museum für Naturkunde in Münster, Germany, revealed that the find represents a marine reptile from the Triassic, the period that predates the Jurassic. This news reached Prof. Sander of the University of Bonn while on sabbatical in Los Angeles. “I could not believe that there was a plesiosaur from the Triassic, given that these animals had been studied by paleontologist for nearly 300 years, and never was there one older than Jurassic,” said Sander.

He also notes that only through the timely and efficient cooperation between the private collector, the natural heritage protection agency, the Münster museum, and the scientists, the unique find could be described and published. The detailed research by Ph.D. student Tanja Wintrich of the Steinmann Institute of the University of Bonn revealed that the find represents the oldest plesiosaur, at an age of about 201 million years, which makes it the only plesiosaur skeleton from the Triassic period.

The reconstructed length of the skeleton is 237 cm (7′ 7″) (part of the neck was lost to quarrying). “We are looking at a relatively small plesiosaur,” says Wintrich. The scientists bestowed the name Rhaeticosaurus mertensi on the unique fossil. The first part of the name refers to its geologic age (Rhaetian) and the second part honors the discoverer. Together with scientists from Osaka Natural History Museum, the University of Osaka, the University of Tokyo and the Paris Natural History Museum, the team from Bonn studied a bone sample. First, they examined the interior of the bone using computed tomography. Then they cut thin sections for microscopic study from especially promising parts of the bone.

Based on the growth marks in the bones, the researchers recognized that Rhaeticosaurus was a fast-growing youngster. They compared the thin sections with those from young plesiosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous. “Plesiosaurs apparently grew extremely fast before reaching sexual maturity,” says Sander. The paleontologists interprets this as a clear indication that plesiosaurs were warm-blooded. Since plesiosaurs spread quickly all over the world, “they must have been able to regulate their body temperature to be able to invade cooler parts of the ocean,” says the paleontologist. Because of their warm-bloodedness and their efficient locomotion, plesiosaurs were extremely successful and widespread—until they disappeared from the face of the earth. Sander says, “At the end of the Cretaceous, a meteorite impact together with volcanic eruptions lead to an ecosystem collapse, of which plesiosaurs were prominent victims.”

More information: Tanja Wintrich, Shoji Hayashi, Alexandra Houssaye, Yasuhisa Nakajima, P. Martin Sander: A Triassic plesiosaurian skeleton and bone histology inform on evolution of a unique body plan, Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1701144 , http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/12/e1701144

Source: www.newscientist.com

AN extinct marsupial “tiger” is to be brought back into existence by an Australian scientists who successfully mapped its genetic sequence.

The tantalising prospect of resurrecting the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine – once the stuff of science fiction movies like Jurassic Park – has taken one step nearer reality following a pioneering study, which as based on examination of the DNA of a female cub preserved in ethanol since 1909.

Andrew Pask, a researcher from the University of Melbourne, which undertook the study, said sequencing the thylacine’s code was a first step in cloning the animal.He explained: “As this genome is one of the most complete for an extinct species, it is technically the first step to ‘bringing the thylacine back’.”

However, Mr Pask sounded a note of caution, adding: “We are still a long way off that possibility. We would need to develop a marsupial model to host the thylacine genome, like work conducted to include mammoth genes in the modern elephant.”

The thylacine – which despite the name, was not closely related to the tiger – became extinct on mainland Australia 3,000 years ago, but survived on the island of Tasmania until the 20th century. It was hunted there relentlessly by European settlers who regarded the animals as a threat to their sheep, with the government offering a bounty of £1 per carcass. The last known specimen, a male known as Benjamin, died in Hobart Zoo in 1936, although the species was not officially declared extinct until 1982.

However, the study also found that the thylacine was at risk of extinction as a result of a lack of genetic diversity, which meant it had difficulty adapting to changing environmental circumstances. Mr Pask said: “They were actually in pretty bad genetic shape and it wasn’t because of their isolation on Tasmania. It was a longer-term decline in their history. “We certainly made them go extinct — there’s no question about that. But we now know even if [thylacines] were still around today they’d probably be in the same genetic dire circumstances as the Tasmanian devil [another species which is under threat].”

The study – which was published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution – suggests that the thylacine’s genetic health became compromised 70,000 to 120,000 years ago, and that the Tasmanian population became isolated when the island became cut off from the mainland 14,000.On the mainland, its extinction has been blamed on extreme weather conditions and drought.

It could take many years – and a great deal of money – to bring back the thylacine, but Mr Pask still thinks there is a moral responsibility to try.He said: “I think we were responsible for hunting [the species] to extinction – in that case, we almost owe it to the species to bring it back.”Even if they fail however, all may not be completely lost – for, despite being extinct, officially at least, there have been frequent reports of sightings, leading some to claim that small numbers of thylacine may still exist in remote parts of Tasmania.

Source: express.co.uk

Hold on to your butts because it sounds like Jeff Goldblum may not be the only original cast member returning for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as a new rumor is seemingly placing Sam Neill on-set…

“They’re moving in herds… They do move in herds”

Ever since Universal announced Jurassic World and its upcoming sequels, fans have been clamoring to see some of their favorites from the original trilogy return, especially Sam Neill (Alan Grant), Laura Dern (Ellie Sattler), and Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm). Now, while next year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom made good on bringing back Dr. Ian Malcolm, who’s expected back for a cameo of sorts, there’s been radio silence regarding the other two flagship characters. However, there may be good reason for that.

According to a source, Sam Neill may have actually paid a visit to Pinewood Studios in London – or Shepperton Studios to be exact – in late August, which is coincidentally exactly where J.A. Bayona filmed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He reportedly arrived via a blacked out van and was apparently sporting the same look as his Hunt for the Wilderpeople character, which, in layman’s terms, means he probably had a beard.

Back in July, stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard had completed principal photography on the highly-anticipated sequel, but considering that a film of this magnitude will have months and months of extensive post-production work, there would certainly be more than enough time to fit in a special cameo without much fanfare if they so chose to do so.

Once again, we implore you to take this report with a huge grain of salt.

Author, paleo-artist and natural history illustrator Mohammad Haqqani won the second prize at the 9th International Scientific Dinosaur Illustration Contest, held in Castile and Leon, Spain.

Winners were announced in late November. The first prize was granted to Italian paleo-illustrator Franco Tempesta who depicted a scene from the Morrison Formation in Jurassic period in which an Allosaurus fragilis pack is attacking a larger dinosaur known as Barosaurus lentus.

Haqqani, who won the second prize, had painted a Confuciusornis, a genus of primitive crow-sized birds from the Early Cretaceous Yixian and Jiufotang Formations of China, dating from 125 to 120 million years ago.

The International Scientific Dinosaur Illustration Contest was organized by the Dinosaurs Museum of Salas de los Infantes and the Dinosaur CyL Foundation, a research institute based in Castile and Leon, focusing on study of dinosaurs and management of paleontological heritage, the Dinosaur CyL Foundation Fundaciondinosaurioscyl.blogspot.com wrote.

The third prize was given to Ukrainian paleo-artist and illustrator of prehistoric animals Sergey Krasovskiy who depicted a wet forest in Liaoning, northeastern China, dating back to Aptian age, a subdivision of the Early and Lower Cretaceous epoch (145 to 66 million years ago).

Selected illustrations are currently on display at an exhibition at the Dinosaurs Museum of Salas de los Infantes in Castile and Leon. The show will continue through early spring of 2018.

The jury included Fidel Torcida, director of the Dinosaurs Museum, Diego Montero, member of the scientific team of the museum, paleo-illustrators Davide Bonadonna, Carlos Papolio and paleontologist Angelica Torices.

Int’l Collaboration

For over 10 years, Haqqani has been working as an illustrator and cooperating with museums and reference book publishers and journals around the globe, including the Western Australian Museum, Capstone Publishing, Black Rabbit Books, National Geographic magazine, Studio Fenix and Talaee Publishing.

Haqqani received third prize at the 8th International Dinosaur Scientific Artwork Contest, Spain 2016. He was winner of Gold Plaque and Diploma of Honor at the 17th Festival of Children’s Books 2014 in Iran for the book ‘Golden Age of Dinosaurs,’ written in 2013 by Iranian science writer Erfan Khosravi. His artworks have been published in numerous books such as Digging for Triceratops (2015) by American vertebrate paleontologist Thomas R. Holtz Jr.; Dinosaurs (2017) by US-based children’s author and editor Megan Cooley Peterson; and National Geographic’s 2014 special issue When Dinosaurs Ruled.

Source: financialtribune.com

Over 100 million years ago, beach-bound dinosaurs left their permanent marks on San Antonio’s landscape.

About 110 million years ago, prehistoric creatures strolled across a muddy beach in what is now San Antonio, Texas. The beach and coast have long since relocated. But the dinosaur tracks remain, stamped into now-solid earth by the passage of time.

The tracks are within the Government Canyon State Natural Area. As of right now, they’re Bexar County’s only known dinosaur tracks on public land.

Everyone wants to be with their family for Christmas, but spare a thought for a group of orphan fossils that have been separated from their parents since the dawn of animal evolution, over half a billion years ago.

For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over the microscopic fossils of Pseudooides, which are smaller than sand grains.

The resemblance of the fossils to animal embryos inspired their name, which means ‘false egg’.

The fossils preserve stages of embryonic development frozen in time by miraculous processes of fossilisation, which turned their squishy cells into stone.

Pseudooides fossils have a segmented middle like the embryos of segmented animals, such as insects, inspiring grand theories on how complex segmented animals may have evolved.

A team of paleontologists from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and Peking University have now peered inside the Pseudooides embryos using X-rays and found features that link them to the adult stages of another fossil group.

It turns out that these adult stages were right under the scientists’ noses all along: they have been found long ago in the same rocks as Pseudooides.

Surprisingly, these long-lost family members are not complex segmented animals at all, but ancestors of modern jellyfish.

Dr Kelly Vargas from the University of Bristol said: “It seems that, in trying to classify these fossils, we’ve previously been barking up the wrong branch of the animals family tree.”

Professor Philip Donoghue, also from the University of Bristol, co-led the research with Professor Xiping Dong of Peking University.

Professor Donoghue added “We couldn’t have reunited these ancient family members without the amazing technology which allowed us to see inside the fossilized bodies of the embryos and adults.”

The team used the Swiss Light Source, a gigantic particle accelerator near Zurich, Switzerland, to supply the X-rays used to image the inside of the fossils.

This showed that the details of segmentation in the Pseudooides embryos to be nothing more than the folded edge of an opening, which developed into the rim of the cone-shaped skeleton that once housed the anemone-like stage in the life cycle of the ancient jellyfish.

Luis Porras, who helped make the discovery while still a student at the University of Bristol, said: “Pseudooides fossils may not tell us about how complex animals evolved, but they provide insights into the how embryology of animals itself has evolved.

“The embryos of living jellyfish usually develop into bizarre alien-like larvae which metamorphose into anemone-like adults before the final jellyfish (or ‘medusa’) phase.

“Pseudooides did things differently and more efficiently, developing directly from embryo to adult. Perhaps living jellyfish are a poor guide to ancestral animals.”

Professor Donoghue added: “It is amazing that these organisms were fossilised at all.

“Jellyfish are made up of little more than goo and yet they’ve been turned to stone before they had any chance to rot: a mechanism which some scientists refer to as the ‘Medusa effect’, named after the gorgon of Greek mythology who turned into stone anyone that laid eyes upon her.”

The Bristol team are still looking for fossil remains of the rest of Pseudooides life cycle, including the ‘medusa’ jellyfish stage itself. However, jellyfish fossils are few and far between, perhaps ironically because the ‘Medusa effect’ doesn’t seem to work on them.

In the interim, the embryos of Pseudooides have been reunited with their adult counterparts, just in time for Christmas.

Source: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL