Discovery important for reconstructing ancient food webs, scientist says
Dennis Kovtun · CBC News ·
Mammal foot among the ribs of microraptor (Photo by Hans Larson)
An international team of scientists have discovered new evidence of a dinosaur dining on ancient mammals.
The foot of a tiny mammal was inside the stomach of a microraptor — a small feathered dinosaur that lived during the Cretaceous some 100 million years ago in temperate forests in what is now China.
It’s the first time a piece of a mammal was discovered inside a microraptor.
“Looking at interactions between animals, that’s much easier to tell in the modern biology in living animals because we can actually go out and make those observations,” said Caleb Brown, a curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta.
“Trying to make those inferences for fossils is more difficult because you don’t necessarily know exactly which animal ate which other animal, unless you have exceptional cases like this.”
Reconstruction of Microraptor eating the foot of a small mammal. (Artwork by Ralph Attanasia III)
This find alone will not change understanding of Cretaceous ecosystems and how they evolved, said Corwin Sullivan, a professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, who was involved in the new discovery.
But the discovery will contribute to the accumulation of paleontological knowledge and allow to “build up a very general picture of how food webs functioned, to some degree, in the geological past, how these various species were behaving and interacting,” Sullivan said.
“It’s rare for a preserved fossil vertebrate to have any kind of gut contents, and certainly evidence of dinosaurs eating mammals is rare.
We tend to associate dinosaurs with ground-shaking roars, but the latest research shows that this is probably mistaken.
You’d feel it more than hear it – a deep, visceral throb, emerging from somewhere beyond the thick foliage. Like the rumble of a foghorn, it would thrum in your ribcage and bristle the hairs on your neck. In the dense forests of the Cretaceous period, it would have been terrifying.
We have few clues for what noises dinosaurs might have made while they ruled the Earth before being killed off 66 million years ago. The remarkable stony remains uncovered by palaeontologists offer evidence of the physical prowess of these creatures, but not a great deal about how they interacted and communicated. Sound doesn’t fossilise, of course.
From what we know about animal behaviour, however, dinosaurs were almost certainly not silent.
Now with the help of new, rare fossils and advanced analysis techniques, scientists are starting to piece together some of the clues about how dinosaurs might have sounded.
There is no single answer to this puzzle. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for around 179 million years and during that time, evolved into an enormous array of different shapes and sizes. Some were tiny, like the diminutive Albinykus, which weighed under a kilogram (2.2lbs) and was probably less than 2ft (60cm) long. Others were among the biggest animals to have ever lived on land, such as the titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum, which may have weighed up to 72 tonnes. They ran on two legs, or plodded on four. And along with these diverse body shapes, they would have produced an equally wide variety of noises.
Some dinosaurs had greatly elongated necks – up to 16m (52ft) long in the largest sauropods – which would have likely altered the sounds they produced (think about what happens when a trombone is extended). Others had bizarre skull structures that, much like wind instruments, could have amplified and altered the tone the animals produced. One such creature, a herbivorous hadrosaur named Parasaurolophus tubicen, would have been responsible for the fearsome calls described at the start of this article.
When it comes to mass extinction, meteorite size doesn’t matter
New research shows it’s the composition of the rock a meteorite hits, and not the impactor’s size, that causes an extinction-level event.
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By Alison Klesman | Published: Thursday, January 27, 2022
Near-Earth objects pass by our planet in this artist’s rendering. ESA – P.Carril
It’s a well-known story in our planet’s past: A giant space rock slams into Earth, causing a catastrophe that ends in mass extinction. You might think that when it comes to determining which hits will cause such widespread devastation, the size of the incoming impactor is what matters. But new research suggests that something else might matter more: The composition of the ground where that meteorite hits.
The work, published Dec. 1, 2021, in Journal of the Geological Society, focuses on explaining why some meteorite impacts cause mass extinctions, while others don’t. For example, the famous impact that killed the dinosaurs and left the Chicxulub crater was much smaller than many other impact events that didn’t cause massive loss of species. Why might this be?
It’s all about the dust
An international team of researchers, including experts in mineralogy, climate, asteroid composition, and paleontology, tackled this question by examining 33 impacts over the past 600 million years. Specifically, they looked at the minerals in the massive amount of dust that an incoming meteorite throws up into the atmosphere. That dust can profoundly change Earth’s climate — and it is that climate change which researchers think is a major cause of mass extinctions following impacts.
Hundreds of dinosaur footprints uncovered in Poland
Story by Reuters, Updated 6:33 AM ET, Thu December 16, 2021
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The tracks were found in an opencast clay mine in Borkowice.
Warsaw, PolandHundreds of dinosaur footprints, so well-preserved that even the scaly skin can be seen, have been found in Poland, giving an insight into a complex ecosystem around 200 million years ago, geologists said.
Described by the Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute as a treasure trove, the fossilized tracks and bones were found in an opencast clay mine in Borkowice, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Warsaw.
“In the traces left by dinosaurs, you can read their behavior and habits… we have traces left by dinosaurs running, swimming, resting and sitting,” said geologist Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki.
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An artist’s rendering of how Thanatotheristes might have looked when it ruled the Alberta wilderness 79 million years ago. (Illustration: Julius Csotonyi)
Paleontologists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum have discovered a new species of predatory dinosaur in Alberta.
Called Thanatotheristes, which means “reaper of death,” the 79-million-year-old fossil is the oldest known tyrannosaur from North America and the first tyrannosaur species identified in Canada in 50 years.
Jared Voris, study lead author and a PhD student under University of Calgary professor Darla Zelenitsky, says he identified the new species because of unique features such as the ridges along its jawline.
The fragmentary fossil that Voris studied consisted of parts of a skull and jaw bones that were originally found by John and Sandra De Groot in 2010 about 200 kilometres southeast of Calgary.
“They’re vertical ridges that run the whole length of the jaw that we have, and there’s only a single row of them,” says Voris.
What makes these ridges unique is that only one other group of tyrannosaurs have similar ridges, but they weren’t in North America at the time, Voris adds.
A closeup rendering of Thanatotheristes’ head, showing the vertical jaw ridges that helped scientists confirm it as a new species of tyrannosaur. (Illustration: Julius Csotonyi)
According to Zelenitsky, the discovery of this species tells us a lot about the ecosystem of the time as well. She says the differences in size, shape and other physical features among tyrannosaurs may be a result of adaptations to different geographical regions and environments, available prey and hunting strategies.
Alberta in the time of Thanatotheristes would likely have had a subtropical, temperate climate, similar to Louisiana today.
“This discovery is significant in that it adds to what we know about this poorly-known ecosystem in the Late Cretaceous of Alberta,” says Zelenitsky.
In this lush, biodiverse environment, Thanatotheristes would have been the apex predator, says Caleb Brown, study co-author and a curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
“It would have been the big carnivore at the time. It would have fed on things like duck-billed dinosaurs and horn dinosaurs,” he says.
University of Calgary professor Darla Zelenitsky and PhD student Jared Voris with fossil fragments of Thanatotheristes. (Photo: Royal Tyrrell Museum)
Citizen scientists essential to further discoveries
According to Brown, the most intriguing thing about the research is what more could have been known about Thanatotheristes had the fossils been better preserved.
“The specimen De Groot found obviously came from a skull that would have been completely put together at some point,” he says.
“What intrigues me is what would have happened if the specimen was found 20, 50 or 100 years ago. How much more complete would it have been, and how much more of the animal would we have known?”
Zelenitsky says the only way to know more is to keep looking.
“The issue is that a lot of these animals or species just aren’t preserved or haven’t been found yet by a paleontologist,” she says.
Brown agrees, adding that ordinary citizens can contribute by keeping an eye out for what they think could be fossils.
“A lot of our really important scientific discoveries in the last several decades have been made by members of the public and this is no exception,” he says.
“For every paleontologist, there are millions of people around, walking their dog, going for hikes, fishing in the river. If you find something you think is interesting, it probably is, so take a picture and report that to a museum because you might end up finding a new species of dinosaur like John De Groot.”
A couple of stories that I know will interest some of our members:
BBC reports “JK Rowling to release new Harry Potter eBooks”.
The disappearing dinosaur mug (For Keith?)
1) BBC reports “JK Rowling to release new Harry Potter eBooks”.
Non-fiction? Seriously?
JK Rowling is to release four new Harry Potter eBooks next month, offering fans the chance to “delve deeper into the rich history of magic”. Rowling’s Pottermore website will publish the non-fiction stories, which will be devoted to all things from the “wizarding world”.READ the article
2) Your hot coffee (or tea) turns dinosaurs into fossil attractions!
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