Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Dinosaur fossil originate in Alberta in 1916 a new-fangled type

Dinosaur fossils

After meeting dirt on a ledge for more than 90 years, two before unnoticed skulls have been recognized as an original dinosaur type which once roamed the plains of southern Alberta.

The skeleton of the recently named Spinops Sternbergorum were at first exposed southeast of Calgary in 1916 by a father and son science squad.

Charles and Levi Sternberg — who are now privileged in the original dinosaur's first name — sent two fractional skulls to London's Natural History Museum and even spoke a guess that the bones might point to a before unidentified dinosaur.

But those investigative the skulls at the British museum at the time disagreed labeled the fossils as "refuse" and the skeleton were punctually beyond for years.

Virtually a century afterward, a squad of global scientists rummaging through the museum's set of skeleton stumbled ahead the skulls, re-examined them intimately and set up that they belonged to a kind unidentified awaiting now.

"We had no plan that it was out there, that's why it was so astonishing to find it," said Andrew Farke, guardian at California's Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and guide author of a learn which named the original dinosaur.

"When many colleagues and I dotted these specimens in the set, we right away knew it was amazing dissimilar."

The discovery of the original kind comes at a moment when scientists' facts of horned dinosaurs is "rising exponentially," said Farke, who further that Canada has a vital place to take part in the deepening of our information on the creatures that roamed the ground millions of years ago.

"Over the earlier 20 years or 30 years there's been an actual rebirth of paleontology in Alberta," he said. "I think Alberta is going to trait actually highly in the paleontology reports more than the after that little years."

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Detection of dinosaur footpath at Red Rock excites scientists

Dinosaur footpath
In an ocean of dunes stretching to the prospect, a size the dimension of a Doberman strode through damp sleek that squished between its talon-tipped toes. Where the creature was headed and why has been misplaced eternally down the health of geologic moment, however its mud-covered path march on in an exceedingly chunk of stonework twenty-five miles from the band.

Officials at Red Rock Canyon nationwide management space have established the detection of dinosaur footpath and alternative tracks laid down about a hundred ninety million years ago. The footpath was established in early on September by a number of usual company to Red Rock who also helper at the protection area.

Researchers established the find throughout a meadow journey to the place just before the start of a global paleontology meeting detained in Las Vegas early on this month.At least one of the three-toed prints is ringed with what looks like ripples caused when the animal's bottom marked behind in the mire."They pace down, the ripples go away, and it stays there for 180 or 190 million years. It's unbelievable," said Tim Wakefield, filed manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management at Red Rock.

It is the primary detection of its class inside the 195,000-acre maintenance area. Experts are vocation it the primary place of dinosaur tracks to be officially recognized anywhere in Nevada. At first flush, he said, the tracks emerge to approach from a two-footed, meat-eating dinosaur that was most likely no more than about 3 feet long from snout to tail.

But Breithaupt warned that it is "very hasty" to say about something with conviction about the person. The footpath was originated in a sheet of Aztec sandstone, the similar kind of rock in which fossilized dinosaur tracks have been discovered in Utah and Arizona.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Long-ignored fossil determined to be brand new species of horned dinosaur

Dinosaur fossil
A set of dinosaur bones unearthed in Alberta in 1916 and left unexamined on a shelf in Britain's Natural History Museum for over ninety years has yielded a sudden and significant discovery: a brand new species of horned dinosaur that is forcing scientists to review the dividing line between two huge, plant-eating beasts associated with the well-known triceratops. The 75-million-year-old skull fragments from many people of the newly identified species were found during a first World War-era dig in an exceedingly dinosaur bone bed southeast of Calgary, inside or just outside of today's Dinosaur Provincial Park.

The specimens were collected by the renowned American fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg and his son Levi.

The family, which later was instrumental in the creation of Dinosaur Provincial Park, created several pioneering paleontologists who went on to distinguished careers in Canadian science, including Levi with the Royal Ontario Museum and his brothers George at the University of Alberta and Charles M. Sternberg of the longer term Canadian Museum of Nature.

The Alberta bones delivered to Britain ninety five years ago were promptly dismissed as indecipherable "rubbish" by the London museum's geology curator. In 2000, when seeing photos of the fossils that suggested they could in fact, represent a brand new species, Canadian paleontologist Michael Ryan —currently curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History — visited the British museum solely to find that the bone fragments had been misplaced.

More recently, American dinosaur professional Andrew Farke contacted Ryan to mention that he'd found the Sternberg specimens and agreed that they marked an important but long-overlooked insight into the evolution of horned dinosaurs.

Monday, December 5, 2011

MSU lab manager shares microscopic pictures of dinosaur bones with growing audience

Dinosaur Bones

dinosaur bone that Ellen-Thérèse Lamm produces and the colorful images taken of those fossils underneath a Montana State University microscope still gain new audiences. So far this year, the manager of the Gabriel Lab for Cellular and Molecular Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) has revealed analysis with MOR Curator of Paleontology and MSU's Regents' Professor Jack Horner during a French scientific journal, created a 2012 MOR calendar, been featured in a trade magazine and been chosen as a finalist in a global photomicrography contest.

The microscopic structure of dinosaur frills at completely different stages of growth was described and analyzed during a paper Lamm co-authored with Horner. The paper was published in April in Comptes Rendus Palevol a French journal of paleontology and evolutionary sciences. Lamm created the thin-section slides used in this research to capture the photographs for her and Horner's publication, which described the distinctive tissue growth strategies that Triceratops used to ultimately grow such a massive expanded frill.

The photomicrographs were taken with a polarized light-weight microscope, which enables scientists to control light-weight conditions to analyze the optical qualities of a sample, Lamm said. Polarized light-weight passing through a thin-section of bone is split at different angles depending on the structure and organization of the crystal structures. It is then re-collected by an analyzer and delivered to the attention during a variety of colors and patterns.

"The pictures are not only stunning and intriguing, but indicate differing kinds of biological tissue, as well as show the orientation of fibers in the original bone," Lamm said."The images are not stunning and intriguing, however indicate different types of biological tissue, as well as show the orientation of fibers in the original bone," Lamm said.