Tag Archives: Alberta

Pachycephalosaur discovery in Canada

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Researchers think Acrotholus audeti looked much like this. Image Courtesy: Julius Csotonyi

From Science Fare Media:

New dog-sized pachycephalosaur unearthed in southern Alberta

Small size hints that more similar-sized dinosaurs are still probably waiting to be discovered

Lee Flohr

May 7, 2013

When Roy Audet let researchers scour his ranch for creatures that roamed there roughly 85 million years ago, he didn’t expect them to find the fossil of a new dinosaur with features that he’ll jokingly admit they might share – he didn’t expect it to be named after him either.

But, a team of researchers from Canada and the United States did just that when they found a skull cap belonging to a new species of pachycephalosaur on his southern Alberta ranch in 2008.

“I get lots of jokes because I am a bit hard headed you know,” Audet told SciFare.com.

Formally named Acrotholus audeti, it’s the oldest pachycephalosaur dome found in North America – maybe even the world – it’s roughly two inches thick and sat on the head of a dinosaur that’s about as big as a large dog, but stretched roughly six feet long from tip-to-tip.

“It has a very well developed dome for its geological age,” David Evans, study co-author and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, told SciFare.com. “The vast majority of dome-headed dinosaurs in the fossil record are basically based on isolated skull caps.”

Fortunately for researchers, they found a less complete dome sitting on their shelf after it was recovered from the same region, more than 50 years ago.

“Even though I had recognized it as being something distinct, it wasn’t until Caleb found the really good specimen in 2008 that we really clinched it,” Evans said. “It’s very well preserved, has a lot of detail and shows how a lot of characteristics of pachycephalosaurs that we thought appeared later in the fossil record, actually occurred earlier.

In order to look dome’s internal structure, researchers used a CT-scanner and found that by the time the dinosaur started walking into the fossil record it had already evolved into one complete unit.

“So, the acquisition of a very tall dome had occurred, at least, by the time of Acrotholus, 85 million years ago,” he added.

The CT-scan also allowed them to determine the dinosaur’s life stage without destroying it – traditional methods require them to slice the bone and dye it – and weighing roughly 100 pounds, it was entirely possible that it belonged to a juvenile.

“We can tell by the density how mature the individuals are,” Evans said. “In this case the dome’s extremely dense and that’s something we only see in the most mature adults.”

Turns out their thick skulls actually have profound consequences for the entire fossil record – their unique head gear may be the only reason we know them at all.

By dinosaur standards, Acrotholus is small. The researchers say that if a mature, small bodied pachycephalosaur exists, small bodied versions of other dinosaurs should exist too – but they don’t.

“Their bones are very small and susceptible to weathering and destruction by predators,” Evans said. “Something about the size of a small dog would be one bite for a predator, and all of those bones would be gone.”

So, if they didn’t end up as hors d’oeuvres, their skeletons were certainly ground up by the sands of time – the planet looked a lot different 85 million years ago.

When the researchers added the new find to the pachycephalosaur family tree, they found Acrotholus’ dome was closely related to a pachycephalosaur from Mongolia, known as Prenocephale.

Fortunately, its skeleton is more complete and researchers were able to use it to generate the image of Acrotholus’ – the turtle in the picture was also found on Audet’s ranch and described by a team that included Evans in 2012.

Eric Snively studies how pachycephalosaurs might have used their thick skulls – he wasn’t part of this discovery though. He told SciFare.com the research is interesting because it shows much there’s still left learn about this time period – known technically as the Santonian – and pachycephalosaur evolution during it.

“They would have split off from their sister group, which are horned dinosaurs like Triceratops and their relatives, many millions of years before we find the first good pachycephalosaur fossils,” Snively, who’s currently a post-doctoral researcher at Ohio University, told SciFare.com.

“There are still a lot of gaps to fill in, but we know that by the time this animal was around they were pretty standard looking pachycephalosaurs,” he added.

He’s also intrigued by the idea that many other small-sized dinosaurs are likely waiting to be discovered – if their existence hasn’t been ground out of the fossil record.

“It’s showing us more evidence that there’s greater diversity of small dinosaurs than we thought,” Snively said.

Evans said his team’s gearing up to head back to Audet’s ranch later this spring so they can hunt for more new and cool fossils. For Audet, it’s just another chance to learn something cool about the creatures that once dominated his ranch, 85-million years ago.

“It’s always fun for me when someone comes along from the scientific community because I can always learn something,” Audet said. “It’s not difficult for me to help ‘em across the river with a canoe or let ‘em park in the yard.”

The new dinosaur was described in the journal, Nature Communications.

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Dinosaurs could swim, new research

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This video is called Extreme Dinosaurs (BBC Documentary).

From the University of Alberta in Canada:

New study produces strong evidence that two-legged dinosaurs were good swimmers

Dinosaurs are long extinct but their role in understanding life on Earth in the 21st century is vital, says a dinosaur researcher at the University of Alberta.

“Humans have been around for about 200,000 years; dinosaurs ruled for Earth for 160 million years,” says U of A paleontologist Scott Persons. “From dinosaurs we’ve learned about colour vision in some of today’s animals, and the ancient animals are linked to the evolution of other life we take for granted, like birds and flowering plants.”

Persons’ latest PhD research has produced some of the strongest evidence ever found that dinosaurs could paddle long distances. Persons arrived at that conclusion after examining unusual claw marks on fossilized rocks found in China.

Persons’ swimming-dinosaur study involved working with an international team of researchers in China’s Szechuan Province. Persons determined that a series of claw marks found in now well-known dinosaur tracks were left by the tips of a two-legged dinosaur’s feet.

“The dinosaur’s claw marks show it was swimming along in this river and just its tiptoes were touching bottom,” said Persons.

The claw marks cover a distance of 15 metres, which the researchers say is evidence of a dinosaur’s ability to swim with co-ordinated leg movements. Persons says the tracks were made by a carnivorous, two-legged dinosaur he estimates to have stood roughly one metre at the hip.

The research was conducted with a team of paleontologists on the ground in China, but Persons says he and his fellow U of A dinosaur hunters don’t have to go far afield to make important discoveries—one of the reasons he decided to study at the university.

“I don’t even have to leave the Edmonton city limits, and when I do, the fossil treasure trove in the Alberta badlands is less than a day’s leisurely drive away,” said Persons.

Persons and his colleagues from the Szechuan Province fossil site will continue to analyze the dinosaurs’ swimming prowess with hopes that it will yield evidence related to today’s animals. In the meantime, Persons offers a few links paleontology has already established between life on Earth 65 million years ago and today.

“Want to know why our pet dogs or livestock have limited colour vision? It’s because early mammals sacrificed cones for rods in their eyes so they could see better in the dark and better avoid dinosaurs.

“Want to understand the widespread success of modern flowering plants? Well, they evolved under the selective pressures of herbivorous dinosaurs.

“Want to know where birds come from? Dinosaurs.”

Persons was a co-author on the research, which was published April 8 in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.

See also here.

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Canadian garden birds webcam

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This video says about itself:

Bird feeder in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Small birds in HD.

May 2010, house finch, black capped chickadee, nuthatch, sparrow.

From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the USA:

New FeederWatch Cam

Our newest Bird Cam takes you to the well-stocked feeders of Tammie and Ben Hache in chilly Manitouwadge, Ontario, Canada, over 40 miles north of Lake Superior. The Haches invite you to look in on their rotating ensemble of winter birds, including redpolls, grosbeaks, nuthatches, jays, and even the occasional Ruffed Grouse. Each week the cam host posts her Project FeederWatch counts for the week and you can see whether she’s spotted something you missed. The cam is offline during the night (generally 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.)

Enjoy this addition to our Bird Cams, and marvel at the resilience of these winter birds, which seem to shrug off frigid temperatures. There’s also still time to sign up for this year’s Project FeederWatch season and start making your bird watching “count”! Watch the cam anytime between the hours of 7 A.M. and 7 P.M. Eastern time.

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Horned dinosaur discovery in Canadian museum

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This video is called Tribute to Ceratopsids.

By Michael Tutton in Canada:

November 8, 2012 | 4:05 am

Horned dinosaur discovery in Alberta

A piece of a fossilized reptilian horn that sat in an Ottawa museum for decades has led to the discovery of a new dinosaur species the size of a rhinoceros that roamed Alberta 80 million years ago.

Pieces of skulls from the recently named Xenoceratops were originally dug up from rocky sediments in southern Alberta sediments in 1958.

However, a pair of paleontologists rediscovered the bones a decade ago and gradually pieced together the sweeping neck plate of the four-footed, horn-headed giants.

Their work has been published in the October issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The 3,000-kilogram creatures used their beak-like mouths to munch on plants and had a fearsome appearance due to a sweeping neck shield topped by two protruding spikes.

Canadian paleontologists Michael Ryan and David Evans say in their paper that the fossils were first discovered at a dig near Foremost, Alta., by American paleontologist Jann Langston Jr., who was working in Canada at the time.

They said Langston, now a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, left the bone fragments wrapped up and shelved in the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

Evans said he and Ryan started to wonder in 2003 about two pieces of the neck shield — known as the frill — stored loosely in metal cabinets at the Ottawa museum. One was a spike and the other was an unusually large socket, he recalled.

He said the pieces aroused his curiosity in part because they came from rock formations that contained some of the oldest dinosaur fossils in Alberta.

That led them to investigate further in 2009, when they found Langston’s bone fragments from at least three animals, wrapped in a plaster and burlap casing. They were helped by Kieran Shepherd, curator of paleobiology for the Canadian Museum of Nature.

“Sure enough there was much more material and that was the key to identifying the new species,” Evans said in an interview.

The paleontologists took the fragments to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where they pieced together the metre-long piece of neck bone and then returned it to Ottawa.

They named the animal with the Greek words meaning “alien-horned face,” due in part to its unusual appearance.

Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, said he gradually learned that they had come upon the oldest known big-horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsids.

The herbivores are part of a family that later diversified, featuring a remarkable array of varying horn and frill configurations, said Ryan.

Orphaned bones like the ones they came across sometimes only make sense decades after they’re found, he added.

“The early fossil record of ceratopsids remains scant,” said Ryan. “This discovery highlights just how much more there is to learn about the origin of this diverse group.”

The scientists also suggest the size of the horns may have played a role in reproductive success — the bigger the horn, the more attractive they were to their female counterparts.

“We feel they were actually used for mate recognition. … We think the male dinosaurs with the biggest horns were the most reproductively successful,” said Ryan, though he added that this theory is a source of debate.

“It was that ornamental arms race on their skulls that drove the evolution.”

This dinosaur is just the latest in a series of new finds made by Ryan and Evans as part of their Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project, designed to improve knowledge of late Cretaceous dinosaurs and their evolution.

The project focuses on the paleontology of some of the oldest dinosaur-bearing rocks in Alberta, which is not as well studied as that of the famous badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park and Drumheller.

See also here. And here.

Einiosaurus: here.

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New Canadian beetle species discovery

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Charlene Wood studies deadwood beetles and has discovered species new to Alberta. Photograph by: John Ulan, University of Alberta photo

From Wildlife Extra:

Seven new beetle species identified in Canada

Tiny forest beetles are not rare

November 2012. Seven beetle species new to science have been discovered by a young University of Alberta researcher just starting out in her career. Charlene Wood, who had only just finished her master’s degree in the Department of Renewable Resources, noted the tinier-than-usual species while studying beetles in decaying aspen trees in northwestern Alberta.

Now Wood, in collaboration with fellow scientists, is preparing to describe the beetles for science. Having studied them over the past four years, Wood is becoming recognized for her knowledge of this group, known by only a few other experts across the globe.

Deadwood

Her study of deadwood-a largely overlooked part of the North American boreal forest-is one of the few studies in Canada focused on the rich diversity of beetles that dwell in decaying wood. Wood’s work revealed different beetles in each stage of the decay sequence in aspen wood. Along with recording seven new species in this habitat, Wood found an additional 47 beetle species not previously known to occur in Alberta-a significant addition to the list of provincial species.

Wood said “It’s a dream, as a biologist. I certainly didn’t think I would discover new species when I began my project. It’s an eye-opener. There are several species right under our noses that we didn’t know even existed.”

Less than 3 millimetres long

All seven species she found are less than three millimetres long; most beetles studied are larger and more conspicuous, Wood said. Six of the species feed on fungus and are members of the group known as minute brown scavenger beetles. The seventh species is a monotomid beetle, which is thought live in the tunnels created by bark beetles in newly dead trees and feed on fungus and larvae of other beetles.

“Deadwood offers a whole variety of distinct habitats, and those habitats are home to hundreds of beetle species, some of which haven’t been scientifically reported yet,” added Wood, who has successfully defended her thesis and admits to being excited about finding the beetles.

Not rare

Some of the new beetle species are quite abundant, and Wood feels they could be more widespread in Canada.

“While these are undescribed species, they aren’t rare or uncommon beetles. That they haven’t been reported previously is likely a consequence of limited taxonomic expertise and lack of studies on non-pest species.”

Vital part of forest ecosystem

Beetles are important players in forest ecosystems, Wood said. The insects are a food source for songbirds and woodpeckers, and by consuming the wood of dead trees and then excreting the digested wood fragments, many beetles help return to forest soils nutrients that were once taken up by living trees.

“I often get the ‘ick’ factor when I tell people I study beetles, but they are a fascinating and important group for us to understand. Beetles are very diverse, they occupy most major habitats on land, and very few are pests. Contrary to being harmful to humans, they do us a service by being important natural components of many ecosystems.”

Wood hopes her research increases understanding of how beetles contribute to overall forest diversity, and how to preserve their habitats while harvesting resources.

“If one of the central tenets of sustainable forest management is to maintain biodiversity, the first step is knowing the species and what habitats they really require.”

Wood’s work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Alberta Conservation Association Grants in Biodiversity, the EMEND project and Daishowa-Marubeni International Ltd.

Wood’s work is associated with the U of A’s Ecosystem Management Emulating Natural Disturbance (EMEND) project.

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