The first fossil of Archaeopteryx was a single feather–the one that Carney has turned into a tattoo. It was discovered in 1861 in a limestone quarry near the town of Solnhofen and brought to Hermann von Meyer, one of Germany’s leading paleontologists at the time. As scientists would later determine, this exceptional feather was 145 million years old. Despite its antiquity, the feather looked much like the feathers on the wings of living birds.

The fossil was so extraordinary that Von Meyer wondered if some forger had etched it. After all, Solnhofen limestone was prized for making finely detailed lithographic prints. But then von Meyer compared the slab and the counterslab and found them to be identical.

Now 150 years later, we know a lot more about the Archaeopteryx and how it fits in the evolution of dinosaurs to birds. Read how many of these discoveries came about at The Loom. Link

Megalonyx jeffersonii

Fossils rarely do scientists the courtesy of showing up intact, so putting them together is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. A tough one. Without a picture on the box to go by. It’s no wonder a few old bones have made some of the world’s smartest scientists look so stupid.

1. All the President’s Sloths

In decades past, American presidents apparently had hobbies other than playing golf and eating at McDonald’s. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was an avid paleontologist. As early as the 1790s (before it was cool), he kept an impressive fossil collection at his home in Monticello. So when a group of confused miners came upon some unidentifiable bones in a West Virginia cave, they sent them to Jefferson. Judging from the long limbs and large claws, the president suspected they belonged to a giant cat “as preeminent over the lion in size as the mammoth is over the elephant” and that the animal might still exist somewhere in the unexplored West.

Jefferson got the size right. The description? Not so much. The animal he named Megalonyx (giant claw) was actually one of the giant ground sloths that very slowly roamed America during the last ice age. And while Jefferson later agreed with this alternative diagnosis, his error wasn’t a complete waste. The Megalonyx marked one of the first important fossil finds in the United States, and it prompted the first and second scientific papers on fossils published in North America. In honor of the president’s contribution, the sloth’s name was later formalized to Megalonyx jeffersonii.

2. A Bone-headed Approach

To this day, the Brontosaurus remains one of the most popular and recognizable dinosaurs in history – an impressive feat for an animal that never existed. The confusion started in 1879, when collectors working in Wyoming for paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh found two nearly complete – yet headless – sauropod dinosaur skeletons. Wanting to display them, Marsh fitted one specimen with a skull found nearby, and the other with a skull he found in Colorado. Voila! – the Brontosaurus was born.

(Image credit: Flickr user yuan2003)

Unfortunately for Marsh, the skeletons were later exposed as adult specimens of a dinosaur already discovered, the Apatosaurus. The error was formally corrected in 1903 by Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum, and scientific papers haven’t called the animal Brontosaurus since. Seventy more years passed before researchers determined that the skulls Marsh borrowed really belonged to the Camarasaurus, a discovery of his archrival, Edward Drinker Cope. Pop culture, however, missed the memo altogether.

3. Getting Your Head Screwed on Right

Paleontology’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, Marsh and Cope had a nasty and long-running professional rivalry. Although they’d actually started out as friends (with each even naming a discovery after the other), by 1870 their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. A year earlier, Cope had assembled a skeleton of the sea reptile called Elasmosaurus. However, in his rush to publish his discovery, he placed the head on the wrong end, giving everyone the impression that the animal had a very long tail instead of a very long neck. Marsh poured ample salt in that wound by making fun of Cope’s error in print (suggesting he rename the animal “twisted lizard”) and constantly ridiculing it at parties and exhibitions. Given the stakes, he might as well have slapped Cope across the face with a glove and insulted his mother. As it was, all Cope could do was try and buy up all the published examples of his posterior-backwards construction.

Incorrect image of Elasmosaurus published by Cope.

The feud only grew from there. The two men fought over allegations that, on a tour of Cope’s digging operations in New Jersey, Marsh bribed collectors to send key fossils to him. And in 1877, a part-time collector in Utah incited a whole new string of cutthroat arguing by trying to sell bones from his site to both of them. Other feud highlights included a series of snippy “he said, he said” pieces in the New York Herald and the time the Smithsonian confiscated much of Marsh’s fossil collection after Cope accused him of misusing tax dollars to hoard fossils for himself.

For all the angst it caused them, though, Marsh and Cope’s constant one-upmanship was great for science. During their 20-some years of bickering, the two added 136 new species (including Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus) to the nine that had previously been discovered in North America.

4. Pulling Teeth

Henry Fairfield Osborn was a giant in the field of paleontology, but he also has one giant mistake to his name. In 1922, while serving as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn received a fossil of a tooth found in Nebraska. Suffering from a bout of overconfidence, the normally careful scientist published a paper announcing (based on one tooth, mind you) that he’d discovered Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, the first anthropoid ape unearthed in North America.

Amédée Forestier's illustration of Nebraska man

Taking into account that all of this was happening just three years before the Scopes Monkey Trial, word of a missing link was a pretty big deal. Add to that British anatomy professor Sir Grafton Elliott Smith touting the discovery as a potential breakthrough, and artist Amedee Forestier drawing a famously speculative picture of the “Nebraska Man” (and Woman) in the widely read Illustrated London News. Although Osborn never hypothesized where (or if) his ape fit into the evolutionary chain, he used the discovery to fuel his war of words with anti-evolution blowhard William Jennings Bryan. Osborn made sure to note the irony of the tooth having come from Bryan’s home state, and even suggested calling the ape Bryopithecus in honor of “the most distinguished primate which the state of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

Unfortunately, in this particular case, said distinguished primate got the last laugh. Upon further examination, it was determined that the tooth belonged to a millennia-old peccary – otherwise known as an ancient pig. In fairness to Osborn, the similarities between human and peccary teeth had already been noted in scientific literature, so it wasn’t that wild a guess. Of course, that didn’t stop creationists from pouncing on the mistake.

5. Creating a Monster

Long before there was a science called paleontology, people were trying to come up with explanations for giant bones found in the ground. And often, those explanations pointed to mythological creatures. Of all the fairy-tale creatures accused of inhabiting the ancient world, the griffin might claim the most direct connection to actual fossils. Usually depicted in folklore as a lion with an eagle’s head and wings, the griffin was said to fiercely guard its gold. The hybrid animal appears consistently in the art of ancient Rome, Greece, and Persia, and its legend apparently originated with Scythian nomads who wandered east toward Mongolia’s Gobi desert.

Griifin (left) and Protoceratops fossil

So how do fossils fit in? The Gobi is filled with the fossils of both the Protoceratops, a lion-size dinosaur with a birdlike beak, and of the similarly beaked Psittacosaurus. And while there were no massive hoards of gold around, the skeletons were often found guarding something arguably more valuable – hoards of eggs. The ancients were wrong about griffins, but that may have had more to do with misdiagnosing evidence than with legend or superstition.

6. Talk About Your Stale Food

Herodotus is considered the world’s first historian, but he came this close to also being the world’s first paleontologist. While traveling in Egypt, he noticed that the bricks used to build the pyramids had unusual, circular shapes petrified in them. What he saw were the sediment-preserved remains of ancient single-celled organisms. Of course, what he thought he saw were the remains of lentils eaten by the pyramid builders after a hard day of lugging around 2-ton pieces of stone.

Herodotus was pretty far off, but he redeemed himself later in his book Histories. In it, he noted that he saw shells in Egypt’s mountains, and rather than attribute them to a shellfish feast for pyramid builders, he correctly surmised that the animals lived in a sea that once covered the desert. “The Delta,” he wrote, “is formed of the deposits of the river, and has only recently, if I may use the expression, come to light.” Regardless, by overlooking the importance of the organisms he found, Herodotus unintentionally delayed for centuries the discovery of one of science’s most important fields. He made his observations in the 5th century BCE, and it took until the 1700s for serious thinkers to realize they were looking at extinct animals. We’re just saying, he could have saved us all a lot of time.

7. Lady in Red

Reverend William Buckland

When it comes to the battle between faith and science, it’s hard to be more conflicted than William Buckland. Both an ordained Anglican priest and a top-notch anatomist, Buckland holds the claim to fame for finding the oldest human remains on record – only he didn’t believe that’s what he’d found. As a Biblical literalist, Buckland strongly supported the notion of Noah’s flood. So, when he made a groundbreaking discovery by digging up prehistoric elephant and hyena bones in a Yorkshire cave in 1822, he concluded that they simply belonged to animals that had perished in the flood.

But that wasn’t all. A year later, while excavating a Welsh cave full of prehistoric animal remains, Buckland found a human skeleton deep in the sediment. Stained red by the surrounding iron and wearing ivory beads, the “Red Lady of Paviland” was, according to Buckland, a woman of ill-repute linked to the nearby remains of a Roman camp (as it couldn’t possibly be as old as all the other bones around it). Later research identified it as a 27,000-year-old man, but Buckland was too caught up in his religious devotion to accept the idea of ancient people in his homeland (or that a man would wear such extravagant jewelry).

8. A Tender Subject

An illustration of Scrotum humanum and the book containing it.

The first time a scientist attributed a fossil to an actual dinosaur was 1677, when museum director Robert Plot identified a bone fragment found in Oxfordshire, England, as part of the thigh bone of a (human) giant. Nearly 100 years later, scientist Richard Brookes gave the unknown species the unfortunate name Scrotum humanum because, well, the fossil did resemble a giant man’s nether regions when positioned a certain way. Naturally, it was (drum roll, please) William Buckland who found other pieces of the dinosaur nearby and gave the specimen the more suitable name Megalosaurus. Don’t worry, though. Buckland didn’t abandon his flood theory; he just figured this was a really big lizard that had drowned. He did, however, make the fossil the subject of the first-ever formal scientific paper on dinosaur remains.

9. Iguana Fix This

After its discovery in 1822, the Iguanodon became one of the first dinosaurs to achieve celebrity status. Depending on whom you believe, the massive plant-eater’s tooth was found by either Dr. Gideon Mantell or his wife. Regardless, Gideon was the one who realized the fossil came from an extinct category of reptile much larger than any still around.

Thanks to Mantell’s obsessive drive to find more bones, Iguanodon turned into a bit of a sensation, helped along by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who made life-size models of Mantell’s animal. Most famously, at an 1853 dinner at London’s Crystal Palace, 21 prominent scholars dined inside Hawkin’s scale model of an Iguanodon.

The Crystal Palace Iguanodon

These sculptures were true to Mantell’s description of the animal. Unfortunately, that vision was terribly, terribly wrong. Among the mistakes? The animal walked on all fours (it turned out to be a biped) and had a horn on its nose (the hornlike bone was actually a spiked thumb). The Iguanadon has since undergone a massive makeover, as did Mantell. After his wife left him, he moved to London and became a full-time paleontologist. In 1838, he sold his fossil collection for the then-massive sum of 4,000 pounds (about $20,000).

10. For the Birds

Archaeopteryx fossil photographed in 1880.

There’ve been plenty of hoaxes in paleontology, from Piltdown man to the Cardiff Giant. Yet what makes the story of the Archaeopteryx so painful is that it wasn’t a fake at all. The animal’s crime? Sharing features with both birds and dinosaurs, and being discovered around the time that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was stirring up so much trouble.

The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found in 1860, and it was nothing more than an impression of a feather. Though initially skeptical, German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer verified that it was an ancient feather – but maybe not from a bird. So, a month later, when the same limestone quarry yielded a headless reptilian skeleton with the imprints of attached feathers, von Meyer looked pretty smart. While a number of key scientists needed to see it for themselves before believing the thing was real, other anti-Darwin paleontologists (most notably Andreas Wagner of Germany and Sir Richard Owen of Great Britain) jumped at the chance to dismiss the animal as a full-on reptile rather than a step on the evolutionary path to birds. But they were wrong. Later, when the clear reptile-bird link became indisputable, anti-evolutionists went from nitpicking the classification to calling the whole thing a hoax. As recently as 1990, physicist Lee Spetner famously (and falsely) claimed that the feathers were added to a reptile fossil by making impressions in cement and adding it to the mix. Despite efforts to smear their good name, six Archaeopteryx skeletons have now been found, all with the same bird-reptile blend.

_______________________________

The article above, written by Jeff Fleischer, is from the July-August 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don’t forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog today!

The Triassic World

During the Triassic Period, a creature we call Ichthyosaur swam the seas, chowing down on whatever it wanted–it was the size of a school bus and had a mouthful of jagged teeth, and until Monday, paleontologists assumed it sat at the top of its watery food chain. But a stash of nine interestingly arranged, fossilized icthyosaur bodies discovered in Nevada have long confounded researchers, who haven’t been able to determine how they died. Formerly, it was believed the seas were shallow in that location and the giant proto-whales fell victim to an algae bloom. But evidence from the surrounding rocks indicate the seas were still deep at the time of their demise, leaving science with something of a mystery.

That’s where Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin comes in. “Charles Camp puzzled over these fossils in the 1950s,” said McMenamin. “In his papers he keeps referring to how peculiar this site is. We agree, it is peculiar.” See, the bones of these ichthyosaurs are etched differently from one another, indicating that they didn’t die at the same time. But since they’re all buried together, something interesting had to have happened. And McMenamin thinks that “something” is the work of kraken.

Deliberate Burial

McMenamin believes that the midden-building and predation behaviors observed in modern octopuses–specifically that of the famous Shark vs. Octopus video, wherein an unassuming dog shark gets totally pwned by a seemingly mild-mannered cephalopod–support the theory that gargantuan prehistoric kraken were terrorizing the ichthyosaur population, “either drowning them or breaking their necks.” Suspiciously twisted necks and many broken ribs from the ichthyosaur dig seem to support the idea, as fantastical as it is. But weirdest of all is how the bones came to be buried together, and why their arrangement seems bizarre: “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart,” and rearrange them into what McMenamin believes is “the earliest known self portrait.”

In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.

To illustrate, the bones are arranged like this:

That’s not even a little bit creepy.

Or is it Pareidolia?

Soft-bodied animals, by virtue of definition, have nothing to leave in the fossil layer, so McMenamin’s tentacled beast will likely never turn up even if it did exist. And this presents something of a problem for the theory, since many researchers are “highly skeptical” of his “evidence.” Roger Hanlon, a marine biologist at the Marine Biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says,”There’s nothing in the scientific literature that suggests that modern-day cephalopods do anything like this.” And according to Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the Nevada site “essentially represents a mass burial ground for ichthyosaurs in a shallow sea.” Speaking to Christian Science Monitor, Dr. Thomas Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland declares that McMenamin’s approach to understanding the ichthyosaur peculiarities “is too many steps away from the evidence to call it science.”

But that doesn’t mean that McMenamin is universally scorned: science writers and kraken enthusiasts are rooting for McMenamin and his Triassic tentacled leviathan. Rebecca Boyle of PopSci is sympathetic, hypothesizing that “the hypothetical kraken was just lonely, and, unable to clone itself [as some modern jellyfish can], it made an artistic rendering of an imaginary friend? It seems possible, although maybe less possible [than] the imagined kraken.” But if moral support is what McMenamin needs, Cyriaque Lamar at io9 has got it in spades: ”[T]he possibility of finding that which is essentially a gargantuan mollusk’s macaroni illustration? That’s the kind of glorious crazy you hope is reality.”

What do you think, guys? Is McMenamin’s idea a little too crack-pot to hold water, or is there maybe something to this whole self-expressive kraken thing?

Sources:

• GSA Press Release: Giant Kraken Lair Discovered
• Did an Ancient Kraken Create Its Own Friends? What About a Modern Jellyfish?
• Giant prehistoric krakens may have sculpted self-portraits using ichthyosaur bones
• Kraken monster ruled ancient seas? Scientists wary of new theory.
• Kraken Versus Ichthyosaur: Let the Battle Commence

Image 1 | Image 2

This amazing origami dinosaur would be cool if it were made from any paper, but the selection of materials by creator Tran Trung Hieu puts it over the edge. You can see more of his great works at the BuzzFeed article linked or at the artist’s Flickr page.

Link

This fossilized Polycotylus latippinus, a carnivorous marine reptile that lived 78 million years ago, contains a smaller, less developed skeleton inside of her. Scientists are therefore speculating that this creature did not lay eggs like other dinosaurs, but gave birth to live young. If true, then this dinosaur may have exhibited maternal care behavior similar to modern marine mammals, such as dolphins. This fossil is on public display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, so if you live in that area, you can get a close look for yourself.

Link -via reddit | Photo: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles Count

The next Batman movie is being filmed in Pittsburgh. So students at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh decorated one of the city’s 100 fiberglass dinosaurs — your city has those, too, right? — in a Batman costume. Link -via The Mary Sue | Photo: Anirrudh Koul

Do you own more than one property? Do you have so many rental homes with no mortgage payments, yet you still feel unfulfilled? Tired of your illegal tenants whining that there are rats in the walls? Have you always wanted your own dinosaur? Now is your chance my friend.

In exchange for one of your properties, I will be your personal dinosaur for one year. I will be at your beck and call, 24 hours a day, wearing a dinosaur costume. The type of dinosaur is negotiable. I can babysit your children (references upon request), scare the mailman, wash dishes, entertain and impress your guests, and much more.

Link Via Consumerist Image via TypeFiend [Flickr]

An engraved bone, believed to be from a mastodon, giant sloth or mammoth, may be the oldest example of primitive art ever found in the Americas. The carved bone features the depiction of an ancient mammoth, and was discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in Florida, in an area near Vero Beach where other mammoth bones have recently been found. The archaeological team working on carbon dating the bone feel that it is at least 13,000 years old, and that the etching must be at least that old as well.

Link

What was the average body temperature of the Dinosaurs? Researchers are now able to answer that question by studying their teeth and the results may be surprising.

The new technique measures the concentration of clumps of carbon-13 and oxygen-18 within bioapatite, a mineral in the teeth. The amount these two isotopes bond together depends on the temperature of the host animal, with colder body temperatures leading towards more bonding.

Link

The Pyramids Weren’t Built By Slaves

If you learned one thing about Egypt in school, it was that the pyramids are marvels of ancient technology…and that they were built by slaves. There are movies based around slaves working on the pyramids and every one has seen at least half a dozen pictures of the poor workers straining under the hot sun as their cruel masters wait, whip in hand, for someone to slack off.

But working on the pyramids might not have been so bad after all. While it was still hard work to construct the massive monuments, recent research has shown that the workers were more likely skilled masons who had the right to leave whenever they wanted. Evidence to back this claim is supported in the fact that the workers had their own tombs right beside the pyramids. Egyptologists point out that someone that low on the social ladder would never have been buried so close to the pharaohs.

Image via anniemarieangelo [Flickr]

Everything You Knew About Dinosaurs Is Wrong

Ok, maybe not everything you learned about dinos back in school was wrong, but a lot of it sure was. For one thing, there is no brontosaurus. Yeah, that giant lumbering monster we all learned about in grade school was actually an apatosaurus with the head of a camarasaurus. The worst thing about this inaccuracy is that it was discovered over a century ago, but up until recently, everyone (including a lot of elementary school teachers) still insisted on calling apatosauruses brontosauruses.

I guess one mislabeled dino isn’t that big of a deal…but the incorrect visual representation of just about every dinosaur imaginable is. By now, you’ve probably heard that many dinosaurs probably had feathers, a huge change for those of us who grew up thinking about giant lizards roaming the prehistoric plains. But even those that probably didn’t look like giant birds still looked way cooler and more versatile than the oversized iguanas popularly imagined. These days, we even know what color some dinosaurs were, and they are a far call from the multitude of green shades we once imagined. If you really want to know just how different dinosaurs were compared to what we were taught, check out this great article on Listverse, about the Top 10 Dinosaurs That Aren’t What They Were.

Image via Geoff S. [Flickr]

Arsenic Is One of the Building Blocks of Life

If you learned chemistry or biology in high school, you were probably taught that there are six chemical elements known as the “building blocks of life.” They are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.  These components make up the chemical composition of DNA and without them, life isn’t possible…or at least, we thought it wasn’t possible.

Last year, scientists discovered a bacteria species living in a salt lake in California that was missing one of the building blocks of life, phosphorus, and instead had arsenic in its place. For some people, this might not seem like such a huge deal, particularly considering that arsenic is very close to phosphorus in its physical and chemical properties, but it’s a huge deal to scientists who suddenly saw a massive expansion in the scope of potential living things. It really makes a difference in intergalactic research, since the discovery opens up whole new planets as potential life-supporting ecosystems.

Image via Artful Magpie [Flickr]

Humans Aren’t Really All That Special

Maybe this wasn’t the case for all of you, but when I was in school, the teachers seemed overly fascinated with telling us how much better humans are than other animals. They’d tell the class, “we’re the only animals who have complex emotions,” “no other animal is self-aware like we are,” “humans are the only creatures who use tools,” “we are the only species to communicate through complex language,” etc. I don’t know why they felt our fragile homo sapien egos were so threatened by other creatures, but I always thought that was a little strange. As it turns out, it was completely incorrect too.

Recent studies show that elephants mourn the loss of their companions and many animals, particularly dogs (who have evolved in the companionship of humans), have far more complex emotions than scientists had ever imagined. And chimps don’t just have emotions; they also are self-aware enough to understand how their own actions will affect those around them.

Well, we still have our intelligence to set us apart from the beasts right? Not so quick you homo sapien- supremacists. Actually, there are a lot of intelligent animals out there, many of which use tools and converse amongst themselves. Chimps have used spears to hunt for thousands of years, octopuses use coconut shells as both camouflage and as protection, and dolphins use sponges to help uncover fish that are hiding in the sand.

As for language, bees have an incredibly complex language system allowing them to communicate what type of flower is located in a given place and how to get to that location. Monkeys not only communicate with one another vocally, but they even understand grammar rules. In fact, in some ways, animals are actually ahead of us in the language game. While humans cannot yet speak the language of any other animals, primates can be taught sign language so they can communicate with us in our own language.

Image via Mundoo [Flickr]

If this crushed your memories of grade school, I’m sorry, but now it’s your turn to get revenge. What have you learned isn’t true even though they told you it was a “fact” back in school?

This is really cute! Etsy seller PlaidPigeon modified plastic dinosaur toys so that they’d serve as planters. This one is Rick the Dilophosaurus with a Zebra Haworthia Succulent growing in his back.

Link via Dude Craft

Fossil Food – $11.95

Dig up your dessert! Make your next cupcakes in these fun cupcake molds featuring four different dinosaurs. Each cupcake mold has 3-D “fossil” at the bottom: Triceratops, Pteranodon, Hadrosaur, and T-rex. There’s an archeological expedition in every serving! Fossil Food Dinosaur Cupcakes Molds are new at the NeatoShop, where you can find more dinosaurs and more neat cooking gadgets!

Link

Fossil footprints and detailed studies of its anatomy have proven that Stegosaurus didn’t drag its tail on the mud, but actually walked erect, like an elephant, with its tail held horizontally, parallel to the ground. Its back wasn’t as arched as they had us believe, and the neck was not carried horizontally as usually depicted, but upright, like a bird’s.

Also, the tail spike cluster (known among paleontologists as the “thagomizer”) didn’t actually point upwards, but sideways. This made the tail a much deadlier and more efficient weapon; to stab an attacking predator, Stegosaurus only had to swing its tail horizontally; punctures matching the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes have been found in the bones of predatory dinosaurs from the same age and place, proving once and for all that Stegosaurus wasn’t any less dangerous than the ankylosaurs that would evolve later.

And that’s just the first of ten dinosaurs we once thought we knew. Link -via the Presurfer

But the scientists mean it as a compliment, not an insult. The brontomerus had exceptionally large leg muscles:

It could have given other animals a hefty kick, say its discoverers.

It seems most likely to us that what this is about is being able to deliver a strong kick”

“If predators came after it, it would have been able to boot them out of the way,” said Dr Mike Taylor, from University College London, UK.

The team has named its dinosaur Brontomerus mcintoshi – from the Greek “bronto”, meaning “thunder”; and “merós”, meaning “thigh”.

The fossilised bones of two specimens – an adult and a juvenile – have been dated to be about 110 million years old.

Suggestion: playfully address your wife and/or girlfriend as “thunder thighs”. Explain that you mean it in a good way, particularly that they give the ability to kick hard.

Link via Geekologie | Image: Francisco Gascó

Figuring out how Stegosaurus even could have mated is a prickly subject. Females were just as well-armored as males, and it is unlikely that males mounted the females from the back. A different technique was necessary. Perhaps they angled so that they faced belly to belly, some have guessed, or maybe, as suggested by Timothy Isles in a recent paper, males faced away from standing females and backed up (a rather tricky maneuver!). The simplest technique yet proposed is that the female lay down on her side and the male approached standing up, thereby avoiding all those plates and spikes. However the Stegosaurus pair accomplished the feat, though, it was most likely brief—only as long as was needed for the exchange of genetic material. All that energy and effort, from growing ornaments to impressing a prospective mate, just for a few fleeting moments to continue the life of the species.

Smithsonian has the details on what we know, and how we came to know it, on the subject of dinosaur sex. Link -via Boing Boing

(Illustration by Luis Rey)

80 million years ago, the Linhenykus monodactylus scratched its lottery tickets with only one finger:

Meat-eating dinosaurs were very good at finding food, thus their evolutionary success over some 165 million years. But during their time on earth, they kept losing something that might seem important: their fingers. The earliest carnivorous dinosaurs had five fingers, although only four were actually functional. Many later meat-eaters had only three, and evolution left the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex with only two. Now researchers have unearthed the first known dinosaur with only one finger.[...]

The team suggests that the single, clawlike digit was an adaptation for digging, perhaps for insects such as termites.

Link via Geekologie | Image: Julius Csotonyi

Disappointingly, the Banryu “Guard Dragon” home security robot does not come with laser beam eyes, but it did debut in 2002, so maybe there have been upgrades since that time. This device from TSMUK, a Japanese robotics company, moves slowly — only three meters a minute. And it’s not life-size. But it’s a start in the right direction.

You can watch a video of it at the link.

Link

The biggest dinosaur discoveries of the year include dinosauromorphs, or dinosaur precursors, plus dinosaur diets, dino nurseries, and dinosaur colors. Shown is the feathered dinosaur Anchiornis, whose colors were determined by feather fossils. Check out the entire list, with links to further reading, at Smithsonian. Link -via The Dystenium Science Daily

(Image credit: Michael DiGiorgio)

So Habib teamed up with Mark Witton, a British paleontologist, to plug in factors like wingspan, weight and aerodynamics into a computer model.

The results, which they presented at a conference last month, were staggering: They revealed an animal that could fly up to 80 miles an hour for 7 to 10 days at altitudes of 15,000 feet. The maximum range, Habib says, was probably between 8,000 and 12,000 miles.

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Image: NASA

Previously: The Tiniest Pterosaur

A slab of marble in the Cathedral of St. Ambrose in Vigevano, Italy, appears to contain a cross-section of the skull of a dinosaur:

“The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull. The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth,” Andrea Tintori, the University of Milan paleontologist who spotted the fossil near the altar, told Discovery News.

Measuring about 30 cm (11.8 inches), the skull was cut in sections as slabs of the marble-like rock were used to build the Cathedral between 1532 and 1660.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: Andrea Tintori, University of Milan

YouTube user onredpaper reports that this footage is from an exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. It shows a replica dinosaur skeleton walking.

via Geekologie | California Academy of Sciences | Previously: Dinosaur in a Museum

The Kosmoceratops dinosaur, which roamed Utah 76 million years ago, may have had more horns on its head than any other dinosaur discovered. The Guardian talked with Scott Sampson, a paleontologist:

The animal, named Kosmoceratops, had an enormous two metre-long skull, was five metres from snout to tail and weighed an estimated 2.5 tonnes.[...]

Kosmoceratops, a relative of the more familiar Triceratops, had one horn over its nose, one over each eye, one protruding from each cheek bone and a row of ten across the frill at the back of its head.

“As far as we know it’s the most ornate-headed dinosaur ever found, with so many well-developed horns on its head,” Sampson told the Guardian.

Link via io9 | Image: Lukas Panzarin/PLoS

Artist/musician Molly Lewis modified coloring books to turn dinosaurs into trendy hipsters. Poor Tyrannosaurus Rex. At least he’ll have a project and a mission to join.

Link via Geekosystem | Molly Lewis’ Website

Previously: When Coloring Books Go Bad

In the current study, scientists examined the “pollen and spores” of fossil plants in the layers of mud that infilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape.

Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores – dubbed “fern spikes” – are considered to be a good “markers” of past impact events.

However, there was an unexpected discovery in store for the scientists.

They located a second “fern spike” in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.

Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user moonlightbulb used under Creative Commons license

Now Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form [...]

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

The torosaurus will now be abolished as a separate species and remains from it reclassified as triceratops.

Link via Super Punch | Photo by Flickr user etee used under Creative Commons license

Here at Neatorama, we’ve previously written about a few inventive campaigns by the Dutch advertising company DDB. That firm once turned a subway stairwell into a piano, used zombies to promote cholesterol awareness, and made gorilla attack-proof glasses. One of their more recent efforts touted the effectiveness of a certain line of refrigerators by suggesting that they could preserve meat as old as the dinosaurs.

Link via Super Punch | Company Website | Photo: DDB/Szymon Plewa

Rather than picturing the animals as drowning while crossing a river, a classic scenario that has been used to explain bonebed occurrences at many sites in Alberta, the research team interpreted the vast coastal landscape as being submerged during tropical storms or hurricanes.

With no high ground to escape to, most of the members of the herd drowned in the rising coastal waters. Carcasses were deposited in clumps across kilometres of ancient landscape as floodwaters receded.

“It’s unlikely that these animals could tread water for very long, so the scale of the carnage must have been breathtaking,” said Mr. Eberth. “The evidence suggests that after the flood, dinosaur scavengers trampled and smashed bones in their attempt to feast on the rotting remains.”

Link via Geekosystem | Image: West Virginia University at Parkersburg

You know how your Mom always said, “If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?” Apparently, the dinosaurs did just that. The Film Board of Canada presents this charming 1995 film by Munro Ferguson. Not intended for use as a science lesson. -via Everlasting Blort

Bonhams auction house in New York is held a unique auction on Thursday. On the block? Authentic dinosaur fossils and other artifacts from the ice age.

Among the things sold were skeletons, teeth, skulls, plants, and petrified trees. Most of the items were expected to go to museums, but private collectors also attended the auction.

Up for grabs are a Woolly Rhinoceros skeleton, a Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth — and a stegodon skull. But don’t be tempted to go for the impulse buy — these items don’t come cheap, with experts warning a buyer could expect to pay anything up to and even over $200,000.

Link – via foxnews

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

Kid’s entertainment in Finland is a little different. Hevisaurus is a metal band composed of dinosaurs! Here they perform the song “Jee Hevisaurus.” -via Metafilter

Scientists keep discovering extinct species that hardly seem possible outside of cartoons. If they were still around, we might not be! Web Urbanist shows us some of the biggest, fiercest, and weirdest of animals that are no more. For instance, the whorl shark had its own “jaw saw”!

Whorl Sharks
were similar to their modern cousins despite jetting along almost 300 million years ago. While modern sharks have rows of serrated teeth ready to replace any that fall out, the whorl shark has an interesting lower jaw that looked like a circular saw, where newer teeth would push older teeth further along the line. There’s some debate about the placement of the tooth structure, but regardless of its location in the mouth or deeper in the throat, it had a startlingly unique appearance.

Link

A private owner has donated a fossil that could change the way we think about Tyrannosaurus and their development.

Some scientists believed the T.Rex evolved to its enormous size, then its arms shrank, when they were no longer needed.  The new discovery, though, shows that the tiny-armed killing machine may have evolved from a much smaller killing-machine-with-tiny-arms.  This totally rearranges the previous T.Rex evolution paradigm.

The 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur, unearthed in China and dubbed Raptorex kriegsteini, is “as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs,” Sereno said.

Link

(As a special bonus, check out the religious debate in the comments.)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by HeartlessMachine.

Perhaps the most surprising and most exciting application of this research is that it may allow us to predict the colors of many dinosaurs.

“These include many of our most well loved dinosaurs,” says Prum. “Like velociraptor, the dinosaur that chased the kids around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, was actually fully plumaged.”

While these dinosaur feathers were not used for flight until the appearance of the transitional species Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, they were probably useful for warmth. Prum says we could even learn more about the color of one of the most famous dinosaurs of all, Tyrannosaurus rex.

“In the classic mural The Age of Reptiles in the Yale Peabody museum, they depicted T-rex, which is one of the iconic, huge, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs,” he says. “Recent fossil discoveries have shown that the closest relative of these huge tyrannosaurids actually had tiny skin appendages or fossil feathers—’dino-fuzz.’

Link (with video) -via Metafilter

Bill Zeman’s daughter is the Tiny Art Director. She tells him what to draw and then tells him just exactly how much she hates it. Bill has been recording her comments and posting them with his art since she was two and a half.

Here’s a sample:

The Brief: Purple Gatorade [Rosie's Fish]
The Critique: Dad, that doesn’t look like Purple Gatorade. Only mine looks like Purple Gatorade. You’re going to scan it, and then when you’re done with it, it’s going to be scrappled up and thrown in the garbage. And then mine will be our final picture.
Job Status: Rejected

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bz.

Kelly Ferrell uses a laser to cut these adorable mammoths, there are also t-rexes, butterflies and more. They seem quite hard to put together once you get them, but the result is quite worth it and is certain to attract attention from anyone who sees them.

Link Via Boing Boing