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‘As a big-gutted ankylosaur, you have lots of big digestive chambers that fill up with the rotting gasses’

A dinosaur famously unearthed from a Fort McMurray oilsands mine was likely the victim of “bloat and float,” says Edmonton paleontologist Scott Persons.

The Borealopelta ankylosaur skeleton was found at the Suncor site in 2011, tens of millions of years after it had been “dumped at sea.”

“It had sunk to the bottom and settled down into the very fine silty sediment of the sea floor, before scavengers could disturb it and before the skeleton fell apart,” Persons said during his dinosaur series with CBC Edmonton’s Radio Active.

“Bad stuff usually happened to their bodies. They got torn apart by scavengers, or their carcasses rotted and their skeletons fell apart into a big jumble.

“But not the Borealopelta specimen.”

Much like the opening scene of a murder mystery: a few hard-working labourers were going routinely about their jobs at the remote mine, when they stumbled across the specimen.

A team of expert detectives is called in to investigate, and a slew of mysterious circumstances surface.

The fossil, which is now the centrepiece of a recently opened exhibit at the Royal Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller, is part of a larger paleontological mystery, said Persons, a PhD student at the University of Alberta.

The armoured herbivores, not much larger than the modern hippo, were land animals but their fossils are most often found in areas that were once submerged in prehistoric ocean.

How did the “Suncor Ankylosaur” reach its watery grave? Paleontologists believe they have cracked the case.

The dinosaur likely died in an inland marsh, and as it began to rot, its distended body was carried out to sea, Persons said.

“Bloat and float, that’s something not uncommonly observed today, when the carcasses of cattle can be found bobbing up and down in the ocean,” said Persons.

“Or when the corpse of an Indian elephant is seen floating down even a shallow portion of the Ganges River.”

Persons hypothesizes that the dinosaur was living in the wetlands of prehistoric Alberta, it died of natural causes.

‘Like really gross balloons’

“Imagine this, you are an elder Borealopelta living it up in the wetlands of prehistoric Alberta, but the time has come to shuffle off your mortal coil.”

It died, but not in a violent way, said Persons.

“You aren’t torn apart limb from limb by a hungry tyrannosaur or pack of raptors. You’re done in by a disease, or a heart attack, or maybe you drank some bad swamp water,” Persons said.

“As your body sits in the subtropical sun, you start to rot. Bacteria feeding on your soft insides produce gas as a byproduct.”

“You’re done in by a disease, or a heart attack, or maybe you drank some bad swamp water.” – Scott Persons, paleontologist

The ankylosaur, one of the best-preserved specimens of its kind, is the perfect example of this puzzling phenomenon, said Persons.

The combination of having extra big guts and heavy armour, which would bring the carcass quickly to the bottom of the briny deep, made ankylosaurs particularly prone to bloat and float.

From fossil records, paleontologists can tell that these armoured animals had great barrel-shaped bodies designed to house lots of digestive vats and looping intestines.

“As a big-gutted ankylosaur, you have lots of big digestive chambers that fill up with the rotting gasses quickly and swell, like really gross balloons.

“That’s the bloat.”

Source: www.cbc.ca

Being diagnosed with cancer doesn’t necessarily carry the same weight as it did a few decades ago, and treatments today have increased the survival rates for many types of the disease dramatically. That said, we obviously still don’t have a cure, but new research into the effects of iridium on cancer cells looks not only promising, but incredibly exciting.

The research, which was conducted by a team of scientists from both the University of Warwick and China’s Sun Yat-Sen University, tested a novel approach to combating cancer which involves flooding the cells with a toxic form of oxygen that not only kills off the cancer but leaves surrounding healthy tissue unfazed. The research was published in the journal Angewandte Chemi.

The technique the researchers used is fairly complex, but it all starts with iridium. Iridium is the second densest metal on the planet, and while it’s fairly rare to find here on Earth, it’s often found in large quantities in asteroids. The dinosaur-killing space rock that slammed into the earth some 65 million years ago is thought to have been responsible for much of the iridium found here today, and it’s a key ingredient in a cancer-fighting cocktail.

To create the cancer-conquering substance, scientists created a compound of iridium and organic matter which was then used against the cancer cells. The compound converts the oxygen found within the cells into what is called singlet oxygen, which behaves dramatically when interacting with organic compounds and is toxic to the cancer. When the proteins of the targeted cancer are attacked it dies off, while the healthy cells around it remain unaffected.

“This project is a leap forward in understanding how these new iridium-based anti-cancer compounds are attacking cancer cells, introducing different mechanisms of action, to get around the resistance issue and tackle cancer from a different angle,” Cookson Chiu, co-author of the study and postgraduate research at Warwick explained.

Source: bgr.com

A monstrous, meat-eating flying reptile that had a wingspan of a small airplane, could walk on all fours and stalked its prey on land has been found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.

Fortunately for us humans, who would have made for a delightful midday snack, this pterosaur is dead. Long dead. Seventy million years dead.

Scientists think this pterosaur had to settle for a diet of little dinosaurs.

Researchers from the United States, Japan and Mongolia have been collecting the prehistoric animal’s skeletal remains since 2006, when Buuvei Mainbayar, a paleontologist from Mongolia, discovered its first fossil in the western Gobi.

Mainbayar showed the fossil to Takanobu Tsuihiji of the University of Tokyo, and “I immediately recognized that it might be a pterosaur and was astonished at its gigantic size,” Tsuihiji said. “Straight away, we went back to the site and discovered the rest of the specimen.”

What they discovered were the remains of a flying monster that would have stood 18 feet high on the ground and had a wingspan that rivaled the length of the two largest pterosaurs currently known: Quetzalcoatlus, found in Texas in the 1970s, and Hatzegopteryx, found in Romania in the 1990s.

The Mongolian pterosaur has not been declared a new species yet, because of its incomplete remains.

“Although fragmentary, the specimen is from a gigantic individual … extending the geographic range of gigantic pterosaurs to Asia,” the scientists wrote in their report, which has been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Source: foxnews.com

The division of dinosaurs into two groups, a taxonomy that dates back to the Victorian era, is looking increasingly shaky to some paleontologists in light of a wealth of new fossil discoveries.

The dinosaur family tree has two main branches: the bird-hipped dinosaurs and the lizard-hipped dinosaurs. Paleontologists have built upon this idea for nearly 130 years. Textbook writers know it. Museum curators know it. Even children know it.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the established dinosaur family tree is, well, a dinosaur?

That question has sparked a heated debate among paleontologists. The Victorian-era model now has a formidable rival.

The debate reverberates beyond paleontology, as learning about dinosaurs often marks our first interaction with evolutionary biology. So as the scientists delve into the data, they open a window for the public to view how scientific models change.

“Just because we grew up with these ideas doesn’t mean that that’s set in stone,” says Peter Makovicky, associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago. “We have to continuously revisit the evidence.”

It began in March. With all the new dinosaur fossils – just last year saw 36 new species described – it’s time to rethink the structure of the dinosaur family tree, according to Matthew Baron, who was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge at the time. After examining a massive dataset of dinosaur fossils, Dr. Baron and his advisors proposed a new model, placing the typically two-legged lizard-hipped theropods (like Tyrannosaurus) on a branch with the bird-hipped dinosaurs (like Stegosaurus and Triceratops), and the four-legged lizard-hipped, long-necked sauropods (like Brontosaurus) off on their own branch.

That shake-up of the dinosaur family tree set off a whirlwind of press activity and a flurry of exchanges among paleontologists. But we shouldn’t rewrite the textbooks just yet, say another group of paleontologists, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. This team, led by Max Langer of the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, reexamined the data underpinning the Baron et al. paper and concluded that the traditional dinosaur family tree should still stand – at least for now.

But the debate is still far from settled. This responding study actually found support for both models. The difference was “statistically indistinguishable,” says study co-author Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, although the results slightly leaned toward the traditional model.

The Victorian model

That family tree traces its roots back to 1888, when a British paleontologist, Harry Seeley, proposed that the distinction between dinosaur groups hinged on the hips. Seeley noted that all the dinosaur hip fossils on hand could easily be sorted into two groups determined by whether their pubic bones pointed forward or backward. Those that pointed forward resembled the hips of lizards, so Seeley dubbed that group saurischians (“lizard-hipped”). Likewise, the ornithischians (“bird-hipped”) had backward pointed pubic bones resembling those seen in birds.

So what does it take to overthrow a scientific model?

“Right now we’re at a point where we don’t really know with a lot of confidence” what the best model is, Dr. Brusatte says. “There have been so many new fossils, and now there are new datasets and some new techniques that are being used, and it’s thrown everything up into the air.”

What’s a paleontologist to do? The dinosaur family tree, or phylogeny, as scientists call it, underpins the major questions about how these creatures came to rule the Earth millions of years ago. And toppling an established scientific model is no easy feat.

“When you propose such a radical change to a well-established idea, you need very strong evidence,” Dr. Langer writes in an email. “The evidence they were putting forward in support of their model was not as strong as necessary to overthrow decades of studies pointing to another direction.”

Baron and his colleagues penned a rebuttal to the new paper. Still, Baron hopes that the debate will ultimately transcend the back-and-forth of papers and that all the scientists will find a consensus as a team.

For living animals, building phylogenies can be a bit less controversial, because the animals’ genomes are available. And that foundation can reveal surprising relationships. For example, genetic research in 2014 revealed that a tiny shrew that lives in Namibia is actually closely related to elephants.

But when it comes to dinosaurs, all paleontologists have to work with is appearance. DNA degrades too quickly to have lasted the millions of years that have elapsed since the dinosaurs went extinct (sorry, “Jurassic Park” fans). And bones and footprints can be ambiguous.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re making it up,” Brusatte says. “It just means that it’s going to be different depending on which human is looking at these bones and trying to make sense of them.”

With so many dinosaur fossils turning up around the globe, paleontologists have to rely heavily on each others’ descriptions of a new specimen to classify where the species fits in. And that’s where the disagreements come in, right at the root of the discussion.

For more than a century, paleontologists largely sought to place each new find somewhere on the tree that grew out of Seeley’s categorizations. Baron says that when a fossil wasn’t a perfect fit, “we always tried to shoehorn the new find into the old model somehow.”

A ‘Rosetta Stone’ fossil

Could there be some sort of Rosetta Stone fossil that sits just at the right point in the Triassic period, when dinosaurs first emerged, that could resolve the debate? Possibly, says Brusatte. If that animal had a mix of features distinctive of both ornithischians and theropods, then that would be evidence that Baron and his colleagues are correct.

But evolution itself could confound such a revelatory find. Sometimes two unrelated species can undergo convergent evolution, a process by which two different animals independently evolve a similar trait. For example, birds have backward oriented pubic bones (aka bird hips), and they’re dinosaurs. But they are not ornithischians (“bird-hipped” dinosaurs). Birds actually evolved from the theropod lineage, which is one of the two main groups classified as “lizard-hipped.”

Furthermore, evolution isn’t linear, it’s bushy and has many dead ends. In other words, a fossil with features of two different groups might not be in the middle of a transition from one to the other. And because not every organism is preserved in the fossil record, determining what is and is not a dead end can be tricky.

“There’s a lot of gray areas and a lot of debates, and there’s a lot of things that we just don’t know. It’s not because we have no evidence. It’s not because we’re not looking. It’s because we have so much evidence that it’s kind of conflicting, and we have to find a path through that chaos.” says Brusatte. “At the end of it all, something might emerge, some kind of consensus, but it might not be for a while.”

Despite the dramatic headlines, a new dinosaur family tree might not actually be a scientific revolution, says Derek Turner, a philosopher of science at Connecticut College. “I do think it would be a pretty significant change if the new model catches on,” he says, as it will open up new questions about dinosaur evolution. “But I think a lot of the upheaval would be more on the public understanding side.”

Dr. Makovicky, who was not an author on either paper, agrees. For many children, this is the first evolutionary family tree they learn about from the deep past, he says. And that divide between bird-hipped and lizard-hipped dinosaurs is deeply entrenched in books and museum displays.

But just as dinosaurs have long helped engage children and adults alike with science, this debate can help communicate a key piece of how science works. “Science is not just pushing the boundaries of what we can call new knowledge,” Makovicky says. “A big part of science is actually self-correction and revising things that we assumed we knew.”

Source: www.NatGeo.com

Though his return to the franchise was touted earlier this year, don’t expect to see much of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in the upcoming “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”.

Malcolm was a key supporting character in the first film and the main lead in the second, but sat out the next two movies. Speaking on the Empire podcast this week, the beloved actor suggests his scenes are so short that they could easily cut him out of the film if the need arises:

“It’s small. Who knows, they may cut me out entirely! But if I stay in I’ll be a sprig of parsley or a little garnish, hopefully with some impact!”

B.D. Wong’s Henry Wu is the only other character from the original “Jurassic Park” trilogy confirmed to appear in “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” though James Cromwell’s Benjamin Lockwood character has key ties to the late Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond who started the park.

Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Toby Jones, Daniella Pineda, Ted Levine, Geraldine Chaplin and Kevin Layne co-star in the J.A. Bayona-directed film which opens June next year.

The catastrophic asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago may not have been so devastating had it hit almost anywhere else on earth. It means dinosaurs could still rule the earth and humans may never have evolved at all.

The Chicxulub asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs likely released far more climate-altering sulfur gas into the atmosphere than originally thought, according to new research.

A new study makes a more refined estimate of how much sulfur and carbon dioxide gas were ejected into Earth’s atmosphere from vaporized rocks immediately after the Chicxulub event. The study’s authors estimate more than three times as much sulfur may have entered the air compared to what previous models assumed, implying the ensuing period of cool weather may have been colder than previously thought.

The new study lends support to the hypothesis that the impact played a significant role in the Cretaceous - Paleogene extinction event that eradicated nearly three-quarters of Earth’s plant and animal species, according to Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom and co-author of the new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“Many climate models can’t currently capture all of the consequences of the Chicxulub impact due to uncertainty in how much gas was initially released,” Morgan said. “We wanted to revisit this significant event and refine our collision model to better capture its immediate effects on the atmosphere.”

The new findings could ultimately help scientists better understand how Earth’s climate radically changed in the aftermath of the asteroid collision, according to Georg Feulner, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany who was not involved with the new research. The research could help give new insights into how Earth’s climate and ecosystem can significantly change due to impact events, he said.

“The key finding of the study is that they get a larger amount of sulfur and a smaller amount of carbon dioxide ejected than in other studies,” he said. “These improved estimates have big implications for the climactic consequences of the impact, which could have been even more dramatic than what previous studies have found.”

A titanic collision

The Chicxulub impact occurred 66 million years ago when an asteroid approximately 12 kilometers (7 miles) wide slammed into Earth. The collision took place near what is now the Yucatán peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. The asteroid is often cited as a potential cause of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction that erased up to 75 percent of all plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.

The asteroid collision had global consequences because it threw massive amounts of dust, sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The dust and sulfur formed a cloud that reflected sunlight and dramatically reduced Earth’s temperature. Based on earlier estimates of the amount of sulfur and carbon dioxide released by the impact, a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters showed Earth’s average surface air temperature may have dropped by as much as 26 degrees Celsius (47 degrees Fahrenheit) and that sub-freezing temperatures persisted for at least three years after the impact.

In the new research, the authors used a computer code that simulates the pressure of the shock waves created by the impact to estimate the amounts of gases released in different impact scenarios. They changed variables such as the angle of the impact and the composition of the vaporized rocks to reduce the uncertainty of their calculations.

The new results show the impact likely released approximately 325 gigatons of sulfur and 425 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more than 10 times global human emissions of carbon dioxide in 2014. In contrast, the previous study in Geophysical Research Letters that modeled Earth’s climate after the collision had assumed 100 gigatons of sulfur and 1,400 gigatons of carbon dioxide were ejected as a result of the impact.

Improving the impact model

The new study’s methods stand out because they ensured only gases that were ejected upwards with a minimum velocity of 1 kilometer per second (2,200 miles per hour) were included in the calculations. Gases ejected at slower speeds didn’t reach a high enough altitude to stay in the atmosphere and influence the climate, according to Natalia Artemieva, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona and co-author of the new study.

Older models of the impact didn’t have as much computing power and were forced to assume all the ejected gas entered the atmosphere, limiting their accuracy, Artemieva said.

The study authors also based their model on updated estimates of the impact’s angle. An older study assumed the asteroid hit the surface at an angle of 90 degrees, but newer research shows the asteroid hit at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. Using this revised angle of impact led to a larger amount of sulfur being ejected into the atmosphere, Morgan said.

The study’s authors did not model how much cooler Earth would have been as a result of their revised estimates of how much gas was ejected. Judging from the cooling seen in the previous study, which assumed a smaller amount of sulfur was released by the impact, the release of so much sulfur gas likely played a key role in the extinction event. The sulfur gas would have blocked out a significant amount of sunlight, likely leading to years of extremely cold weather potentially colder than the previous study found. The lack of sunlight and changes in ocean circulation would have devastated Earth’s plant life and marine biosphere, according to Feulner.

The release of carbon dioxide likely led to some long-term climate warming, but its influence was minor compared to the cooling effect of the sulfur cloud, Feulner said.

Along with gaining a better understand of the Chicxulub impact, researchers can also use the new study’s methods to estimate the amount of gas released during other large impacts in Earth’s history. For example, the authors calculated the Ries crater located in Bavaria, Germany was formed by an impact that ejected 1.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This amount of gas likely had little effect on Earth’s climate, but the idea could be applied to help understand the climactic effects of larger impacts.

More information: Natalia Artemieva et al, Quantifying the Release of Climate-Active Gases by Large Meteorite Impacts With a Case Study of Chicxulub, Geophysical Research Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1002/2017GL074879

The actor, who played Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, has already had the experience…

We think we’ve found the last person in the world who hasn’t seen Jurassic Park, and it’s the man who works at the car rental place in Honolulu airport.

When actor Sam Neill – that’s right, the star of Jurassic Park – flew in to the island for a holiday, the guy behind the desk asked him whether he wanted to have “the Jurassic experience” and go on a tour of the locations where the film was shot.

Unsurprisingly Sam had this brilliant reaction.

According to the tour’s website, you can “hop aboard a vintage school bus and take a photo of yourself at the infamous Jurassic Park fallen tree”.

Sam already has that photo.

Oh well. At least it looks like Sam’s having a great time on his holiday!

Source: YALE UNIVERSITY