New Studies give a more accurate picture of T-Rex, and the fossil in your backyard

Two new studies by two separate teams of paleontologists have been published recently giving new details into the appearance and behavior of everybody’s favourite extinct predator, Tyrannosaurus-rex, better know simply as T-rex.

The first study dealt with the question of whether or not T-rex may have sported a colourful coating of feathers on at least portions of its body. After all T-rex is a member of the line of dinosaurs that paleontologists are convinced are closest to, maybe even ancestors of the birds. There is also growing evidence that T-rex’s smaller relatives were in fact covered in insulating feathers, not flight feathers, insulating feathers to help keep the animal warm. (See my post of 16Dec2016 about a feathered dino tail encased in amber!)

With these facts in mind Professor Phil R. Bell of the University of New England in Australia led a team of researchers to examine all of the available fossil evidence to find an answer. Now because skin impressions of dinosaurs are very rare, especially T-rex, Professor Bell and his colleagues also examined the fossils of T-rex’s close and large relatives such as Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbousaurus.

Based on the evidence they found Professor Bell and his fellow paleontologists have concluded that T-rex and the other large Theropod predators did not possess feathers, not even over portions of their bodies. Like any reptile today, T-rex was covered in scales. Professor Bell theorizes that since large, active animals have more problems with overheating than keeping warm T-rex shed whatever insulation its smaller ancestors may have had. The picture below shows a fossilized impression of the skin of a T-rex.

Impression of neck skin from a T-rex (Credit: Black Hills Institute of Geologic Research)

The second study was conducted at the University of Manchester in England and led by Professor William Sellers. Professor Sellers and his team used biometric and biomechanical software programs to study how T-rex would have walked and whether or not T-rex could have run at all as depicted in all those recent Jurassic Park movies. (By the way I hope everyone is aware that T-rex actually lived in the Cretaceous not the Jurassic period!)

Now it a plain fact of nature that as an animal grows larger its weight increases much faster than the strength of its legs. This is why, relatively speaking, the legs of an elephant are considerably thicker than the legs of your dog or cat. Now a T-rex is even heavier than an elephant, and remember T-rex only has two legs on spread its weight on! The possibility that T-rex might have difficulty walking let alone running has to be considered.

Professor Sellers and his colleagues used the latest software biomechanical modeling programs to do just that. Earlier studies had suggested that T-rex might have been capable of speeds as high as 50kph but the new research provided strong evidence that even half that speed would cause ‘unacceptably high skeletal loads’ on the bones in T-rex’s legs.

It appears then that these two recent studies reinforce the picture we had when I was a child of T-rex being a big lumbering reptile. I’m going to try to imbed a short video provided by Professor Sellers and his team showing some of the modeling that they used in their analysis. The link below that will take you to the University of Manchester’s official announcement of the research.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/tyrannosaurus-rex-couldnt-run-says-new-research/

Now, it was just a week ago (15 July 2017) that I posted about my first fossil collecting trip of the year and I’d like to close with a nice little story about keeping your eyes open and maybe you too can make an important fossil discovery.

Jude Sparks, a 10-year old boy who lives in Las Curces, New Mexico was recently playing in his own backyard when he spotted something eroding out of the ground that he thought was the skull of a cow. Doing a little digging Jude quickly realized his skull was too large to be a cow’s. While it was still in the ground, Jude showed what he found to his parents who contacted paleontologists at New Mexico State University.

What Jude had actually discovered was the 1.2 million year old skull of a Stegomastadon, a relative of the more famous Mastodon. The scientists have excavated the skull and hope that more of the animal’s remains may be buried nearby. The picture below shows Jude with his find.

Jude Sparks with his Stegomastadon (Credit: Peter Houde)

A big part of science is really nothing more than keeping your eyes open and knowing enough to be able to say, ‘Hey, that looks different. I wonder what it is?”

Paleontology News for April2017

There’s been some interesting new discoveries in the world of fossil hunters so I though I’d catch up on.

First up there’s been a new study of the ancient animals known as Eurypterids or Sea Scorpions by Scott Persons and John Acorn of the University of Alberta. Now about 450-300 million years ago Eurypterids were the top predator on Earth. growing to up to two meters in length they are the ancestors of modern lobsters, spiders and ticks. See the picture below.

Eurypterid feeding on a jawless Fish

Eurypterids are uncommon but still well known and well studied animals from the Paleozoic era. I have several fragments in my collection and would love to find a nice complete one.

For many years scientists have debated just how the Sea Scorpions actually captured and killed their prey. In particular the question of whether or not they relied solely on the claws near their mouth or did they strike with that pointy tail as a modern scorpion would.

What Doctors Persons and Acorn have succeeded in doing is finding enough well preserved specimens to show that the Eurypterid species Slimonia acuminate was able to turn its tail completely around and attack with a serrated tail spine. See picture below.

Eurypterid flexible tail with spine.

Now all Eurypterids may not have had such a lethal tail but the fact that Slimonia acuminate did answers a lot of questions as well as showing the early stages of the development of the striking tail of a modern scorpion. If you’d like to read more about the research of Doctors Persons and Acorn click on the link below.

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/sea-scorpions-weapon-04794.html

In another story one of the world’s most important fossil sites, a location in China where the remains of some of the earliest multi-cellular life forms have been found, is threatened by mining activities. Part of the Doushantuo formation in southern China the site dates back 600 million years and has yielded important finds including some showing evidence of the development of bilateral symmetry in animals!

Zhu Maoyan of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology has been able to obtain a court order protecting the original site but a more recently discovered site has already been completely stripped by phosphate mining. This is just one example of valuable fossil sites being lost to development. Just last year my personal favourite site in Schuylkill County was just covered over by a highway expansion.

Finally one last story that may appeal to fans of the Jurassic Park movies. A blood engorged tick was recently found in a piece of amber estimated to be 15-45 million years old.

Tick in Amber

While not old enough to have dinosaur blood according to Professor George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University two small holes in the back of the tick indicate that it was removed from its host and dropped into tree sap in a way reminiscent of the grooming habits of monkeys! Could the blood contained in this tick be that of 30-40 million year old primates! Some of the blood that had trickled out of the tick is already being examined and perhaps a DNA analysis will soon be carried out. If you’d like to read more about this discovery click on the link below.

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/blood-engorged-tick-dominican-amber-04757.html

Speaking of fossils, with the weather here in Philadelphia warming up hopefully I’ll soon be doing a little paleontology of my own. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

 

 

After 175 Years of Mystery, Hyoliths have finally been Classified

Just this week an article has been published in the scientific journal Nature that clears up a problem that has plagued paleontologists for over 175 years. The paper by Joseph Moysiuk and Jean Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto along with Martin R. Smith of Cambridge University examined over 1500 specimens of Hyoliths, a rather common Paleozoic marine fossil whose shell resembles an ice cream cone with a lid on top and a spine coming out each side, see picture below.

A Fossil Hyolith

Because only the hard parts of extinct animals are usually preserved the exact kind of animal that lived inside the Hyolith shell remained a mystery. The most common guess was that Hyoliths were a mollusk, that they were either a snail or clam of some kind. However, using specimens from the famous Burgess Shale formation in British Columbia Professor Moysiuk et al succeeded in finding enough of the soft tissue of Hyoliths to be able to determine their feeding mechanism and it turns out that Hyoliths are not mollusks at all but instead are related to Brachiopods, a ancient and very common type of fossil but a phylum which today contains only a few rare species. See the picture below for a reconstruction of a Hyolith.

What a living Hyolith looked like

Compare this to a modern Brachiopod.

Internal structure of a Brachiopod

Whereas Brachiopods attach themselves to the sea bottom by means of a fleshy “pedicle” the Hyoliths seem to have pushed their conic shell into the sand and raised themselves up on their two spines. Because of this difference the scientists maintain that Hyoliths are related to the Brachiopods within a larger group called Lophophorates instead of being a Brachiopod.

The small tentacles reaching out of the Hyolith is the lophophore, the feeding structure common between the Hyoliths and Brachiopods and which gives the larger group its name. If you’d like to read an article in Sci-News about the work of Professor Moysiuk et al click on the link below.

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/hyoliths-cambrian-lophophorates-04531.html

I have two specimens of Hyoliths in my fossil collection, along with thousands of Brachiopods so this discovery by Professor Moysiuk et al is of particular interest to me. Like Dinosaurs and Trilobites I think that the more we learn about the animals that once lived on this Earth the more fascinating they become.

Maybe one day I’ll get to do a post on Nidulites, a rarer and more mysterious Paleozoic marine fossil of which I have about a dozen specimens. Till then.

 

 

 

Feathered Dinosaur Tail encased in Amber!

Remember in the movie Jurassic Park where Richard Attenborough tells Sam Neil et al that his scientists obtained Dino DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes that had been encased in amber. Well wouldn’t it be better just to have the dinosaur itself be encased in amber, or at least a part of one. Well it’s happened, a Chinese paleontologist named Xing Lida found the remarkable specimen in an amber market in northern Myanmar.

Feathered Dinosaur Tail encased in Amber

The specimen is just a portion of the tail of a very small dinosaur, and it’s covered in feathers. Now, it’s not a bird, X-rays revel that the tail bones are arranged differently than those in birds. In fact paleontologists have identified the fragment as belonging to a member of the coelurosaurian group and therefore a relative of the Mighty T-Rex and the well known velociraptors. Although this animal probably only grew to the size of a small bird.

Artists Impression of Bird sized Dinosaur

Researchers haven’t been able to obtain any DNA but they have found soft tissue and decayed blood. This specimen has already given scientists a better idea of how dinosaurs, at least some, where covered in feathers rather than scales making them better able to control their body temperature and could provide the final proof that at least some dinosaurs were warm blooded.

Looking for ordinary fossils is like looking for a needle in a haystack but trying to find such spectacular specimens in amber is certainly needle in a haystack squared. Nevertheless you can be confident that dino hunters out there will be on the lookout and before to long maybe they will find that one specimen that does give us our first actual sample of Dino DNA.

P.S. A couple of posts back I talked a little bit about Cosmic Inflation after the Big Bang and how some cosmologists, and me, think that a simpler model is to look at the Big Bang as a Big Bounce from a previously contracting Universe. Well, Nova Next from PBS just released an article which goes deeper into that very subject. If you’re as interested as I am you can check it out by clicking below.

Did the Universe Start with a Bounce Instead of a Bang?