Dinosaur age bird discovery

This video from Saskatchewan, Canada is called Diving Birds in the Prairies: Late Cretaceous Hesperornithiformes.

From Nature:

Exquisite bird fossils reveal egg-producing ovary

Early avians lost one of two ovaries to take flight.

Brian Switek

17 March 2013

Palaeontologists have discovered the first fossilized traces of developing egg cells in ancient fossil birds, showing a significant trait that already 120 million years ago separate birds from their ancestors. Like modern birds, these ancestors already had reduced their working ovaries to one, setting them apart from their dinosaur cousins.

Zhonghe Zhou, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and colleagues studied a fossil specimen of Jeholornis — an early bird that retained archaic characteristics such as a long bony tail — as well as a pair of fossils that belong to the enantiornithines, another extinct group of birds. All three fossils, according to Zhou and co-authors, contain preserved ovarian follicles, delicate structures containing single egg cells that would have developed into eggs. The researchers present their findings online today in Nature.

“It took us a while to figure out what these strange circular structures actually represent,” says Zhou. The small structures might possibly have been seeds or tiny stones the birds had swallowed to grind food in their digestive system. But on the basis of the size, shape, and position of the rounded structures, the team ruled out the alternative explanations and interpreted them as ovarian follicles.

The researchers point out that the follicles all seem to be on the left side in the three birds, just as they are in their modern relatives. In contrast, the fossilized hips of an oviraptorosaur — a feathered, beaked, theropod dinosaur — contained two eggs, hinting that one egg developed in each oviduct and indicating that non-avian dinosaurs retained two functioning oviducts, similar to modern crocodiles.

Like their reptilian ancestors, ancient birds produced a greater number of eggs at a time than do modern birds. Had the Jeholornis’s follicles developed into eggs, she might have laid as many as 20 in a clutch, Zhou says. The two enantiornithine specimens would have laid five and twelve eggs, respectively.

Taking flight

But why did the reproductive plumbing change in birds? Jeholornis and the two enantiornithines were relatively close to the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to ‘avian dinosaurs‘, Zhou and colleagues say, suggesting that the switch to one oviduct seems to be correlated with the evolution of flight — something that biologists had long suspected.

Palaeontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park agrees that the size, shape and position of the rounded bodies are consistent with the interpretation as follicles, but notes that alternative hypotheses — such as arthropod, amphibian egg or plant fossils — can’t be ruled out just yet. “High-quality scanning-electron microscope scans of the objects might help resolve this,” he says.

Still, provided that the objects really are follicles, Holtz agrees that the fossils show an intermediate state between non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds, and that the presence of one active oviduct would be “loss of a redundant organ to save weight”.

Related articles

• The Early Bird Loses an Ovary (news.sciencemag.org)
• Paleontologists discover fossilized ovarian follicles in three birds from Early Cretaceous (phys.org)
• New dinosaur fossil challenges bird evolution theory (terradaily.com)
• Four-winged birds? First fossils identified (science.nbcnews.com)
• Sex of early birds suggests dinosaur reproductive style (eurekalert.org)

First healed dinosaur wound discovery

From National Geographic:

Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack

A fossilized bite mark on a duckbill dinosaur indicates it survived a T. rex attack.

A Tyrannosaurus rex goes after a duckbilled dinosaur in this artist’s conception.

Illustration courtesy Robert DePalma

The scar. Photograph courtesy Robert DePalma

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published February 28, 2013

A scar on the face of a duckbill dinosaur received after a close encounter with a Tyrannosaurus rex is the first clear case of a healed dinosaur wound, scientists say.

The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Cretaceous Research, also reveals that the healing properties of dinosaur skin were likely very similar to that of modern reptiles.

The lucky dinosaur was an adult Edmontosaurus annectens, a species of duckbill dinosaur that lived in what is today the Hell Creek region of South Dakota about 65 to 67 million years ago. (Explore a prehistoric time line.)

A teardrop-shaped patch of fossilized skin about 5 by 5 inches (12 by 14 centimeters) that was discovered with the creature’s bones and is thought to have come from above its right eye, includes an oval-shaped section that is incongruous with the surrounding skin. (Related: ”‘Dinosaur Mummy’ Found; Have Intact Skin, Tissue.”)

Bruce Rothschild, a professor of medicine at the University of Kansas and Northeast Ohio Medical University, said the first time he laid eyes on it, it was “quite clear” to him that he was looking at an old wound.

“That was unequivocal,” said Rothschild, who is a co-author of the new study.

A Terrible Attacker

The skull of the scarred Edmontosaurus also showed signs of trauma, and from the size and shape of the marks on the bone, Rothschild and fellow co-authorRobert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida, speculate the creature was attacked by a T. rex.

It’s likely, though still unproven, that both the skin wound and the skull injury were sustained during the same attack, the scientists say. The wound “was large enough to have been a claw or a tooth,” Rothschild said.

Rothschild and DePalma also compared the dinosaur wound to healed wounds on modern reptiles, including iguanas, and found the scar patterns to be nearly identical.

It isn’t surprising that the wounds would be similar, said paleontologist David Burnham of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, since dinosaurs and lizards are distant cousins.

“That’s kind of what we would expect,” said Burnham, who was not involved in the study. “It’s what makes evolution work—that we can depend on this.”

Dog-Eat-Dog

Phil Bell, a paleontologist with the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative in Canada who also was not involved in the research, called the Edmontosaurusfossil “a really nicely preserved animal with a very obvious scar.”

He’s not convinced, however, that it was caused by a predator attack. The size of the scar is relatively small, Bell said, and would also be consistent with the skin being pierced in some other accident such as a fall.

“But certainly the marks that you see on the skull, those are [more consistent] with Tyrannosaur-bitten bones,” he added.

Prior to the discovery, scientists knew of one other case of a dinosaur wound. But in that instance, it was an unhealed wound that scientists think was inflicted by scavengers after the creature was already dead.

It’s very likely that this particular Edmontosaurus wasn’t the only dinosaur to sport scars, whether from battle wounds or accidents, Bell added.

“I would imagine just about every dinosaur walking around had similar scars,” he said. (Read about “Extreme Dinosaurs” in National Geographic magazine.)

“Tigers and lions have scarred noses, and great white sharks have got dings on their noses and nips taken out of their fins. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and [Edmontosaurus was] unfortunately in the line of fire from some pretty big and nasty predators … This one was just lucky to get away.”

Mysterious Escape

Just how Edmontosaurus survived a T. rex attack is still unclear. “Escape from aT. rex is something that we wouldn’t think would happen,” Burnham said.

Duckbill dinosaurs, also known as Hadrosaurs, were not without defenses. Edmontosaurus, for example, grew up to 30 feet (9 meters) in length, and could swipe its hefty tail or kick its legs to fell predators.

Furthermore, they were fast. “Hadrosaurs like Edmontosaurus had very powerful [running] muscles, which would have made them difficult to catch once they’d taken flight,” Bell said.

Duckbills were also herd animals, so maybe this one escaped with help from neighbors. Or perhaps the T. rex that attacked it was young. “There’s something surrounding this case that we don’t know yet,” Burnham said.

Figuring out the details of the story is part of what makes paleontology exciting, he added. “We construct past lives. We can go back into a day in the life of this animal and talk about an attack and [about] it getting away. That’s pretty cool.”

Related articles

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• Dinosaur’s Flesh Wound Preserved in Fossil Record (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• ‘Dino Idol’: Vote For Fossil to Be Unveiled (livescience.com)
• Planet Dinosaur (darkheritage.blogspot.com)
• Pop culture misconstrues dinosaur knowledge (stuff.co.nz)
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Chinese dinosaur age bird discovery

This video is called The Fabulous Chinese Fossils— Chaoyang, Liaoning Province.

By Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online:

First Fossil Bird Discovered With Teeth For A Tough Diet

January 7, 2013

A trip to the Galapagos islands will bring you face to face with 14 closely related species of finch that Charles Darwin discovered on his adventure abroad in the 1830s. The finches he noted, still referenced in essentially every biology textbook, had beak sizes of varying lengths and sizes. This was true of both the ground- and tree-dwelling birds, and Darwin postulated that differing diets might have required the birds’ unique beaks for their specialized feeding tasks.

It was these birds, catalogued in 1835, that first helped Darwin to arrive at his theory of evolution. He was able to realize that each of the finch species had originally arisen from one ancestral form and that each of the successive forms – with their individual ecological niches and diets – were what he considered the most perfect examples of adaptive radiation, the process where one species undergoes several distinct changes to survive and thrive in a wider variety of habitats.

If Darwin had lived some 121-125 million years ago, he might have experienced the same sense of wonder at the site

rather: sight

of a Sulcavis geeorum, a species of early bird that existed in the Liaoning Province of what is now modern-day China. It was here that a new fossil discovery was made showing that these early ancestors of the dinosaurs

This should be “descendants of the dinosaurs”. Dinosaurs were ancestral to birds; not the other way round.

had evolved teeth adapted to their specialized diets.

In a report of the finding published in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers say they believe that S. geeorum existed on a so-called ‘durophagous diet’, one that included lots of prey with hard exoskeletons such as insects or crabs.

S. geeorum was an enantiornithine bird, a primitive group of early birds that were abundant in the Mesozoic era and carried over into the Cretacious.

Cretaceous

With the discovery of S. geeorum, researchers are enjoying their own Darwin-like moment as they see this discovery as representing a huge leap forward in the known diversity of tooth shape in early birds. This diversity of shape also leads them to believe that they may have stumbled upon an as yet unrecognized degree of ecological diversity.

According to the research team, S. geeorum is the first fossilized bird discovery that has ornamented tooth enamel. Looking back to the specific dinosaurs from which birds are believed to have evolved, researchers find that their tooth structure was specialized mainly for a carnivorous diet. The enanitiornithine family of birds have undergone the most minimal tooth reductions from their dinosaur cousins compared to any other extinct or extant groups of birds, and they also displayed a wide diversity of individual dental patterns.

In this newest enantiornithine discovery, researchers say that they have discovered a robust set of teeth that are marked with grooves on the inside surface. It is from these grooves, they hypothesize, that the teeth received their strength that allowed them to ingest harder food items.

“While other birds were losing their teeth, enantiornithines were evolving new morphologies and dental specializations. We still don’t understand why enantiornithines were so successful in the Cretaceous but then died out – maybe differences in diet played a part,” according to Jingmai O’Connor, lead author of the new study. One thing that is known is that until this discovery, no previous known bird species had preserved ridges, striations, serrated edges, or any other form of dental ornamentation.

“This study highlights again how uneven the diversity of birds was during the Cretaceous. There are many more enantiornithines than any other group of early birds, each one with its own anatomical specialization,” said the study’s co-author Luis Chiappe, from Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

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• Fossil of Early Bird With Sharp Teeth Uncovered in China (natureworldnews.com)
• Ancient Birds Had Teeth — Strong Ones (hispanicbusiness.com)
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First freshwater mosasaur discovery

This video is called Dinosaur Revolution – Mosasaur Rampage.

The name Mosasaur means literally ‘[river Meuse] lizard’, because the first specimen was discovered near Maastricht city along the Meuse in the Netherlands. However, when they still lived, mosasaurs did not swim in rivers, but in the sea. Until a discovery now …

From The Sticky Tongue blog:

First freshwater mosasaur discovered

A new mosasaur species discovered in Hungary is the first known example of this group of scaled reptiles to have lived in freshwater river environments similar to modern freshwater dolphins, according to research published December 19 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Laszlo Makadi from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Hungary and colleagues from the University of Alberta, Canada and MTA-ELTE Lendület Dinosaur Research Group, Hungary.

The species lived about 84 million years ago, the largest specimens reached about 20 feet in length, and belongs to a family called ‘mosasaurs’, conventionally thought of as gigantic finned marine lizards, similar and perhaps even related to present day monitor lizards. The researchers discovered several fossils of the new species, ranging from small juveniles to large adults that suggest that this species had limbs like a terrestrial lizard, a flattened, crocodile-like skull, and a tail unlike other known members of the mosasaur family.

The fossils were recovered from an open-pit mine in the Bakony Hills of Western Hungary, which were once flood-plains. According to the study, this is the first known mosasaur that lived in freshwater, and only the second specimen of a mosasaur to have been found in rocks that were not once deposited in the ocean. Makadi says, “The evidence we provide here makes it clear that similar to some lineages of cetaceans, mosasaurs quickly adapted to a variety of aquatic environments, with some groups re-invading available niches in freshwater habitats. The size of Pannoniasaurus makes it the largest known predator in the waters of this paleo-environment.”

Even in the modern world, scaly reptiles in the aquatic world are extremely rare. Only a few species live in the water, and even fewer, like marine iguanas and sea kraits, live in the oceans. The new species described here probably adapted to freshwater environments similarly to river dolphins, such as those now inhabiting the Amazon, Ganges and Yangtze rivers.

Citation: Makadi L, Caldwell MW, Osi A (2012) The First Freshwater Mosasauroid (Upper Cretaceous, Hungary) and a New Clade of Basal Mosasauroids. PLoS ONE 7(12): e51781. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051781

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Obama lizard became extinct with dinosaurs

From e! Science News:

Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs also wiped out the ‘Obamadon’

Published: Monday, December 10, 2012 – 17:06 in Paleontology & Archaeology

The asteroid collision widely thought to have killed the dinosaurs also led to extreme devastation among snake and lizard species, according to new research — including the extinction of a newly identified lizard Yale and Harvard scientists have named Obamadon gracilis. “The asteroid event is typically thought of as affecting the dinosaurs primarily,” said Nicholas R. Longrich, a postdoctoral associate with Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics and lead author of the study. “But it basically cut this broad swath across the entire ecosystem, taking out everything. Snakes and lizards were hit extremely hard.”

The study was scheduled for online publication the week of Dec. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Earlier studies have suggested that some snake and lizard species (as well as many mammals, birds, insects and plants) became extinct after the asteroid struck Earth 65.5 million years ago, on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula. But the new research argues that the collision’s consequences were far more serious for snakes and lizards than previously understood. As many as 83 percent of all snake and lizard species died off, the researchers said — and the bigger the creature, the more likely it was to become extinct, with no species larger than one pound surviving.

The results are based on a detailed examination of previously collected snake and lizard fossils covering a territory in western North America stretching from New Mexico in the southwestern United States to Alberta, Canada. The authors examined 21 previously known species and also identified nine new lizards and snakes.

They found that a remarkable range of reptile species lived in the last days of the dinosaurs. Some were tiny lizards. One snake was the size of a boa constrictor, large enough to take the eggs and young of many dinosaur species. Iguana-like plant-eating lizards inhabited the southwest, while carnivorous lizards hunted through the swamps and flood plains of what is now Montana, some of them up to six feet long.

“Lizards and snakes rivaled the dinosaurs in terms of diversity, making it just as much an ‘Age of Lizards’ as an ‘Age of Dinosaurs,’” Longrich said.

The scientists then conducted a detailed analysis of the relationships of these reptiles, showing that many represented archaic lizard and snake families that disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous, following the asteroid strike.

One of the most diverse lizard branches wiped out was the Polyglyphanodontia. This broad category of lizards included up to 40 percent of all lizards then living in North America, according to the researchers. In reassessing previously collected fossils, they came across an unnamed species and called it Obamadon gracilis. In Latin, odon means “tooth” and gracilis means “slender.”

“It is a small polyglyphanodontian distinguished by tall, slender teeth with large central cusps separated from small accessory cusps by lingual grooves,” the researchers write of Obamadon, which is known primarily from the jaw bones of two specimens. Longrich said the creature likely measured less than one foot long and probably ate insects.

He said no one should impute any political significance to the decision to name the extinct lizard after the recently re-elected U.S. president: “We’re just having fun with taxonomy.”

The mass (but not total) extinction of snakes and lizards paved the way for the evolution and diversification of the survivors by eliminating competitors, the researchers said. There are about 9,000 species of lizard and snake alive today. “They didn’t win because they were better adapted, they basically won by default, because all their competitors were eliminated,” Longrich said.

Co-author Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, a doctoral student in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said: “One of the most important innovations in this work is that we were able to precisely reconstruct the relationships of extinct reptiles from very fragmentary jaw material. This had tacitly been thought impossible for creatures other than mammals. Our study then becomes the pilot for a wave of inquiry using neglected fossils and underscores the importance of museums like the Yale Peabody as archives of primary data on evolution — data that yield richer insights with each new era of scientific investigation.”

Jacques A. Gauthier, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology, is also an author.

The paper is titled “Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.” The National Science Foundation and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies supported the research.

Related articles

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Dinosaur discovery in Mexico

This video is called Duck-Bill Dino Parts Explained.

Not only news about maybe the oldest dinosaur ever discovered.

Also news about a comparatively late (upper Cretaceous) dinosaur; from Discovery News:

New Dino Had Giant Nose

by Jennifer Viegas

Thu Dec 6, 2012 12:33 PM ET

A new dinosaur with a large, prominent nose has been discovered in northern Mexico.

The duck-billed dinosaur, Latirhinus uitstlani (“lati” is Latin for “wide” and “rhinus” means nose in Greek), lived during the Late Cretaceous approximately 73 million years ago. Found in Coahuila state, it is described in the latest issue of Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology.

Its wide nasal cavity might have given it incredible smell-detecting ability.

“Also, it might have supported and provided enhanced space for a soft tissue structure, sort of like an inflatable bladder, for display, recognition and communication purposes in general,” lead author Albert Prieto-Márquez told Discovery News.

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Grand Canyon, from the dinosaur age?

This video from the USA is called National Geographic – Amazing Flight Over The Grand Canyon.

During the George W Bush administration, there was pressure on scientists to be silent on the fact that the Grand Canyon is much older than the few thousand years of the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible. That flood made the canyon, according to creationists.

All geologists agree that the Grand Canyon is older than five million years. They don’t agree on how much older it is.

Just a few years?

Is it twenty million years old?

Or still older? Today, from Associated Press:

December 3, 2012 at 1:00 am

Controversial study contends Grand Canyon old as dinosaur era

By Alicia Chang

Los Angeles — The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests.

Using a new dating tool, a team of scientists came up with a different age for the gorge’s western section, challenging conventional wisdom that much of the canyon was scoured by the mighty Colorado River in the last 5 million to 6 million years.

Not everyone is convinced with the latest viewpoint published online last week in the journal Science. Critics contend the study ignores a mountain of evidence pointing to a geologically young landscape and they have doubts about the technique used to date it.

The notion that the Grand Canyon existed during the dinosaur era is “ludicrous,” said geologist Karl Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

How the Grand Canyon became grand — with its vertical cliffs and flat plateaus — has been debated since John Wesley Powell navigated the whitewater rapids and scouted the sheer walls during his 1869 expedition.

Some 5 million tourists flock to Arizona each year to marvel at the 277-mile-long chasm, which plunges a mile deep in some places. It’s a geologic layer cake with the most recent rock formations near the rim stacked on top of older rocks that date back 2 billion years.

Doubting the process

Though the exposed rocks are ancient, most scientists believe the Grand Canyon itself was forged in the recent geologic past, created when tectonic forces uplifted the land that the Colorado River later carved through.

The new work by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and California Institute of Technology argued that canyon-cutting occurred long before that. They focused on the western end of the Grand Canyon occupied today by the Hualapai Reservation, which owns the Skywalk attraction, a horseshoe-shaped glass bridge that extends from the canyon’s edge.

To come up with the age, the team crushed rocks collected from the bottom of the canyon to analyze a rare type of mineral called apatite. The mineral contains traces of radioactive elements that release helium during decay, allowing researchers to calculate the passage of time since the canyon eroded.

Their interpretation: The western Grand Canyon is 70 million years old and was likely shaped by an ancient river that coursed in the opposite direction of the west-flowing Colorado.

Lead researcher Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado Boulder realizes not everyone will accept this alternative view, which minimizes the role of the Colorado River.

“Arguments will continue over the age of Grand Canyon, and I hope our study will stimulate more work to decipher the mysteries,” Flowers said in an email.

More number disputes

It’s not the first time that Flowers has dug up evidence for an older Grand Canyon. In 2008, she wrote a study that suggested part of the eastern Grand Canyon, where most tourists go, formed 55 million years ago. Another study published that same year by a different group of researchers put the age of the western section at 17 million years old.

If the Grand Canyon truly existed before dinosaurs became extinct, it would have looked vastly different because the climate back then was more tropical. Dinosaurs that patrolled the American West then included smaller tyrannosaurs, horned and dome-headed dinosaurs and duckbills.

If they peered over the rim, it would not look like “the starkly beautiful desert of today, but an environment with more lush vegetation,” said University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz.

Many scientists find it hard to imagine an ancient Grand Canyon since the oldest gravel and sediment that washed downstream date to about 6 million years ago and there are no signs of older deposits.

And while they welcome advanced dating methods to decipher the canyon’s age, Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico does not think the latest effort is very accurate.

See also here.

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New Moroccan dinosaur gets Tolkien name

From Discovery News:

Dino Named After Lord of the Rings‘ Sauron

This new species has been dubbed with a fantastically evil name, but is it one dino to rule them all?

Tue Nov 6, 2012 11:34 AM ET

Content provided by George Dvorsky, io9

Earlier this year a team of palaeontologists came into the possession of what appeared to be a 95 million-year-old skull cap from a previously unknown dinosaur. Further analysis showed that the bone likely belonged to a carcharodontosaurid — an offshoot of the familiar Allosaurus. Given its unique domed skull, the researchers concluded that it was in fact a newly discovered species, one they’ve decided to name after the demonic Sauron from the Lord of the Rings series.

It’s full name is Sauroniops pachytholus, a massive bipedal carcharodontosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period. The paleontologists, Andrea Cau, Fabio Dalla Vecchia, and Matteo Fabbri, felt that the single fragment provided enough evidence to warrant the classification of an entirely new species, and their work describing the new dinosaur has since been published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Interestingly, the discovery now adds credence to the hypothesis that a fourth large theropod existed in the Cenomanian of Morocco together with Carcharodontosaurus, Deltadromeus, and Spinosaurus (yes, all four of them at the same time — must have been a nice place to visit).

Unfortunately, however, the limited bone fragment reveals achingly little about Sauron. That said, the researchers speculate that it was more than 30 feet in length, and that it was probably just as large as the Carcharodontosaurus. The palaeontologists are obviously hoping to find more fossils to be absolutely sure.

There’s also the prominent bump on its head. Brian Switek from Smithsonian offers some theories as to its function:

Why did such a large theropod have a prominent bump on its head? In other theropod lineages, such as the abelisaurids, bumps, knobs and horns are common forms of ornamentation. Perhaps the same was true for Sauroniops — thanks to Acrocanthosaurus and the sail-backed Concavenator, we know that carcharodontosaurs showed off with visual signals. Then again, Cau and coauthors speculate that the dome might have been a sexual signal or might have even been used in head-butting behavior. I think the last hypothesis is unlikely, especially since we don’t know what the microstructure of the dome looks like and there’s no evidence of pathology, but it’s still a distant possibility.

For now we can only speculate — and hope that more fossils will eventually be discovered.

Check out the studies here and here.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2012) — Paleontology, with its rocks and fossils, seems far removed from the world of developmental genetics, with its petri dishes and embryos. Whereas paleontology strives to determine “What happened in evolution?,” developmental genetics uses gene control in embryos to try to answer “How did it happen?” Combined, the two approaches can lead to remarkable insights that benefit both fields: here.

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Dinosaur’s feathers discovery

From Dinosaur Tracking blog in the USA:

October 25, 2012

Feathery Ostrich Mimics Enfluffle the Dinosaur Family Tree

Another week, another feathery dinosaur. Since the discovery of the fluffy Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have discovered direct evidence of fuzz, feather-like bristles and complex plumage on over two dozen dinosaur genera. I love it, and I’m especially excited about a discovery announced today. In the latest issue of Science, University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky adds another enfluffled species to the dinosaurian ranks. Even better, the specimens raise hopes that many more dinosaurs might be preserved with their feathery coats intact.

Zelenitsky’s downy dinosaurs are not newly discovered species. Ornithomimus edmontonicus was initially described by famed bone hunter C.H. Sternberg in 1933, and it is one of the characteristic Late Cretaceous species found in Alberta, Canada’s fossil-rich Horseshoe Canyon Formation. In Sternberg’s time, these dinosaurs were thought to be scaly, but recent finds of so many feathery dinosaurs has raised the likeliehood that the “ostrich mimic” dinosaur was at least coated in some sort of dinofuzz.

The prediction of fluffy Ornithomimus came from the spread of feathers on the coelurosaur family tree. The Coelurosauria is a major dinosaur group that encompasses tyrannosaurs, compsognathids, ornithomimosaurs, alvarezsaurs, oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs and birds. To date, evidence of feathers has been found in every coelurosaur lineage except one–the ornithomimosaurs. The spread of feathers hinted that some sort of plumage was present in the common ancestor of all coelurosaurs and therefore should have been inherited by the ornithomimosaurs, but, until now, no one had found direct evidence.

A trio of Ornithomimus skeletons have finally confirmed what paleontologists expected. Zelenitsky enthusiastically explained the details to me by phone earlier this week. In 1995, when Zelenitsky was a graduate student, paleontologists uncovered an articulated Ornithomimus with weird marks on its forearms. No one knew what they were. But in 2008 and 2009 a juvenile and an adult Ornithomimus turned up with preserved tufts of filamentous feathers. “When we found these specimens,” Zelenitsky said, “we made the link to the 1995 dinosaur.” All those strange marks on the arms of the previously discovered Ornithomimus, Zelenitsky and colleagues argue, are traces of longer, shafted feathers.

Even though paleontologists expected feathery Ornithomimus, the discovery was still a surprise. “I was in disbelief,” Zelenitsky said. “They’re the first feathered dinosaurs from the Americas, and the first ornithomimosaurs with feathers, as well. It was shocking to say the least.”

But there’s more to the find than simply adding another species of fluffy dinosaurs to the list. The fact that the adult and juvenile animals had different kinds of plumage adds new evidence that coelurosaurs changed their fluffy coats as they aged. “The one juvenile was completely covered in filamentous type feathers,” Zelenitsky said. What the adults looked like comes from the two other specimens. One adult skeleton, lacking forearms, preserves fuzzy feathers, and “the second adult had markings on the forearm.” Together, the specimens indicate that adult Ornithomimus were mostly covered in fuzz but developed more complex arm feathers by adulthood.

Sex is probably behind the plumage change. “We infer that because these wing feathers are not showing up until later in life, they were used for reproductive purposes,” Zelenitsky said. Perhaps adult Ornithomimus used flashy arm feathers to strut their stuff in front of potential mates.

Related articles

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• Some dinosaurs sat on nests like birds (science.nbcnews.com)
• Dinosaurs could swim, new research (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Dinosaur egg study supports evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs (eurekalert.org)
• Dinosaur Egg Study Supports Evolutionary Link Between Dinosaurs And Birds (natureworldnews.com)
• The four-winged dinosaur Microraptor had a rare taste for fish (io9.com)
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Ant-eating dinosaurs?

From Dinosaur Tracking blog:

October 17, 2012

Did Dinosaurs Eat Ants?

If there’s one group of dinosaurs that needs better PR, it’s alvarezsaurs. They’re among the strangest dinosaurs to have ever evolved, yet outside of dinosaur die-hards, few people have ever heard of them. They’re not one of those classic forms–the sauropods, tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs, or ceratopsids–that have been cherished for the past century. Paleontologists only recently began to uncover their bones. Alvarezsaurus itself was named in 1991, but it and its close relatives didn’t quite get swept up in the same wave of dinomania as their other Mesozoic cousins.

Alvarezsaurs weren’t big, toothy, or menacing. That’s part of makes them so special. Alvarezsaurus, Mononykus and their relatives from Cretaceous Asia, South America and North America were small dinosaurs–these feathered dinos ranged from the size of a pigeon to about the size of a turkey. In fact, these dinosaurs were so avian in nature that there was once a debate about whether alvarezsaurs were non-avian dinosaurs or birds that had lost the ability to fly. Since those early debates, numerous studies have confirmed that they were non-avian dinosaurs that were closely related to the strange therizinosaurs and ostrich-like ornithomimosaurs.

But the strangest thing of all is the mystery of what alvarezsaurs ate.

Despite being short, alvarezsaur arms weren’t wimpy. Not at all. Alvarezsaur forelimbs were very stout and included one robust finger tipped in a big claw. (Among these dinosaurs, the total number and development of the fingers varied, but they’re connected by having one finger that was bigger than the others.) In contrast, these dinos often had a reduced number of very small teeth.

Paleontologists thought they saw a connection between these traits and a life feeding on social insects. Mammals such as pangolins and ant-eaters also have stout, heavy-clawed arms and are toothless–a functional pairing that goes with a life of tearing into ant and termite nests to slurp up the scurrying insects in their nests.

Could alvarezsaurs have done the same? So far, it’s the most popular hypothesis for their bizarre nature. In a 2005 paper, paleontologist Phil Senter proposed that Mononykus would have been capable of the kind of scratch-digging needed to rip open social insect nests. Then, in 2008, Nicholas Longrich and Philip Currie described the alvarezsaur Albertonykus in deposits that also contained traces of Cretaceous termites. Alvarezsaurs seemed to have the right equipment and live at the right time to be social insect predators.

But we don’t really know. No one has published any direct evidence that Albertonykus or any other alvarezsaur ate ants or termites. The hypothesis is certainly a reasonable one, but we still need a test of the idea. Fossil feces may eventually hold the answer.

If paleontologists eventually uncover dinosaur dung of appropriate size that contains ants or termites and comes from a habitat shared by alvarezsaurs, that discovery would strengthen the ant-eating hypothesis. A cololite would be even better. While coprolites are petrified feces that have already been excreted, cololites are fossil poop preserved inside the prehistoric creature’s body prior to expulsion. If paleontologists found an alvarezsaur with a cololite containing termites, that would be direct evidence that these dinosaurs truly did snarf down hordes of insects. For now, though, we can only hope that some lucky fossil hunter makes such a discovery.