Greetings, dino-nerds!!! In celebration of the Jimmy Hendricks Manpurse Happy Hour, today marks the triumphant return of Dinosaur News (which has been on hiatus cuz I was busy watching Misfits and stuff!) Please read up and be prepared to discuss.
Here are some bits of news sent to me by you, Slog-tippers! Thank you as always!! (Have a dino-tip? Send it to dinosaurs@thestranger.com!)
Slog-tipper Bill invites us to meet the Dorset pliosaur:
The beast, which is called a pliosaur, has been described as the most fearsome predator the Earth has seen.
The fossil was found in Dorset, but it has taken 18 months to remove the skull from its rocky casing, revealing the monster in remarkable detail.
Scientists suspect the creature, which is on show at the Dorset County Museum, may be a new species or even genus.
Slog-tipper Jeremy—and fellow TSARY guild member—sends this article, which says:
The fate of the dinosaurs may have been sealed half a billion years before life even appeared, by two geological time bombs that still lurk near our planet’s core.
A controversial new hypothesis links massive eruptions of lava that coincided with many of Earth’s largest extinctions to two unusually hot blobs of mantle 2800 kilometres beneath the crust. The blobs formed just after the Earth itself, 4.5 billion years ago. If the hypothesis is correct, they have sporadically burst through the planet’s crust, creating enormous oceans of lava which poisoned the atmosphere and wiped out entire branches of the tree of life.
And finally Slog-tipper Morgan sends shocking news that Archaeopteryx may NOT have been the original bird:
The new discovery, a feathered, chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia, has prompted a fresh look at the dinosaur family tree, casting Archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than dinosaur-like bird.
Archaeopteryx has been fundamental to our understanding of birds’ origins but, if confirmed, this finding questions those assumptions.
A few weeks back there was a post on geneticaly re-engineering extinct animals, in that case a quagga. A lot of us posted about wanting pet dinos.
Here is a TED talk titled “Building a Dinosaur from a Chicken”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVXdEOiC…
Hope I see some dinosaur fossils in the Grand Canyon next week.
The Misfits were playing? I just don’t think it’s be the same…
One: pliosaurs are not dinosaurs, but rather short-necked cousins of plesiosaurs.
Two: it’s well-known that the Deccan Traps were formed around the time of the K-T boundary, but the eruptions would hardly qualify as “oceans of lava”. Also, while the volcanism probably did lead to a decent amount of extinction, the Chicxulub impact probably had a much stronger effect.
Three: there’s plenty of evidence that avian characteristics evolved several times in dinosaurs, and that not all avian dinosaurs are in fact the ancestors of today’s birds. This is interesting, but the phrasing is a bit off.
There are so many gaps in the avian family tree at this point that I’m having a hard time accepting any new “missing link” or “ancestor” claims.
@4 – It bugs me when science reporters play this missing-link game. They’re trying to make it sound like the people in charge of Science have decided to tell archaeopteryx to go fuck itself and punched it in the gut. It’s like A Star Is Born but with birds.
“Once-Beloved Archaeopteryx Now a Worthless Pile of Garbage in Light of Fancy New Chinese Bird-o-saur!”
In fact, someone bring me a version of Sunset Boulevard with a feathered dinosaur as the washed-up has-been.
“I’m still about the size of a chicken! It’s the pictures that got small!”
Clearly the Lord Jesus has shown another glorious sea dwelling beast that swam with humans!! Glory Be!! I am sure that Jesus played with one of these as a young child or perhaps this is the very animal whose belly Jonah was in!
Shout glory to the Lord!!