Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Researchers discover largest 'raptor' dinosaurs lived millions of years earlier than we knew
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-largest-r ... years.html
by University of Kansasl
Utahraptor is going to need 10 million more candles on its next birthday cake.

A geological study of the rock formation that encased a fossilized example of the world's biggest "raptor" shows it's 10 million years older than previously understood. The report, co-written by a researcher with the University of Kansas, recently appeared in the journal Geosciences.

"We determined the age of the dinosaur Utahraptor and found that it was much older than previously supposed," said Gregory Ludvigson, emeritus senior scientist with the Kansas Geological Survey at KU, who collaborated on the investigation. "That finding has important implications for the evolutionary history of dinosaurs."

The fieldwork took place in Utah at the well-known Utahraptor Ridge site, named for larger cousins of the ferocious velociraptor dinosaur (known to fans of "Jurassic Park").

The ridge is home to Stikes Quarry, a fossil quicksand deposit packed with dinosaur fossils that are largely intact and preserved—in much the same positions as when they died. Stikes Quarry is part of the Cedar Mountain Formation, a rock unit containing fossils of more kinds of dinosaurs than any formation in the world.
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Scientists Uncovered Evidence of What Could Be Earth's First Mass Animal Extinction
by Tessa Koumoundouros
May 10, 2023

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Since the Cambrian explosion 538.8 million years ago – a time when many of the animal phyla we're familiar with today were established – five major mass extinction events have whittled down the biodiversity of all creatures great and small.

Last year, researchers from the US published evidence of one occurring earlier, around 550 million years ago during a period known as the Ediacaran.

Though the oceans teemed with a few familiar animals like sponges and jellyfish, most life during this early period of biological history would seem alien to us now. Many of the animals were soft-bodied. Some looked more like plant fronds stuck in place. Others had some form of shell.

Virginia Tech paleobiologist Scott Evans and colleagues compiled data on rare fossils of the squishier kinds of animals from around the world dated to the Ediacaran. They found sudden shifts in biodiversity that had previously been detected weren't mere sampling biases.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientist ... tinction
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weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Humongous, 100-foot-long dinosaur from Argentina is so big its fossils broke the road during transport
News
By Laura Geggel
published 1 day ago
Image
https://www.livescience.com/animals/din ... -transport
About 90 million years ago, a ginormous long-necked dinosaur measuring nearly 100 feet (30 meters) long lumbered through what is now Patagonia, Argentina.
Paleontologists in Argentina have discovered the remains of a ginormous long-necked dinosaur that measured about 100 feet (30 meters) long when it lived about 90 million years ago, a new study finds.

Examining this enormous dinosaur wasn't always easy. The fossils of the titanosaur — the largest of the long-necked dinosaurs — were so heavy, they caused a traffic accident when the researchers were transporting the herbivore's remains to Buenos Aires to be studied.

"The weight destabilized the vehicle and caused an accident," study senior author Fernando Novas, a paleontologist at the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires and a researcher with the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET), told Live Science in a translated email. "Luckily, no one was seriously injured and the bones of this dinosaur, which flew through the air, were so hard that they were not damaged. On the contrary, they broke the asphalt of the road."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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weatheriscool wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:16 pm "The weight destabilized the vehicle and caused an accident [...] luckily, no one was seriously injured
Typical.

weatheriscool wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:16 pm Humongous, 100-foot-long dinosaur from Argentina is so big its fossils broke the road during transport
News
By Laura Geggel
published 1 day ago
https://www.livescience.com/animals/din ... -transport
Image
One of Chucarosaurus diripienda's femurs next to a shovel for size comparison. The femur spans 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) in length. (Image credit: Nicolas Chimento)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chucarosa ... arison.svg
weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Portsmouth palaeontologists have published a paper today showing a pliosaur could have grown to 14.4 metres

10 May 2023

Over 20 years ago, the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs TV documentary series showed a 25-metre long Liopleurodon. This sparked heated debates over the size of this pliosaur as it was thought to have been wildly overestimated and more likely to have only reached an adult size of just over six metres long.

The speculation was set to continue, but now a chance discovery in an Oxfordshire museum has led to University of Portsmouth palaeontologists publishing a paper on a similar species potentially reaching a whopping 14.4 metres - twice the size of a killer whale.

Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, said: “I was a consultant for the BBC’s pilot programme ‘Cruel Sea’ and I hold my hands up - I got the size of Liopleurodon horrendously wrong. I based my calculations on some fragmentary material which suggested a Liopleurodon could grow to a length of 25 metres, but the evidence was scant and it caused a lot of controversy at the time.

“The size estimate on the BBC back in 1999 was overdone, but now we have some evidence that is much more reliable after a serendipitous discovery of four enormous vertebrate.”
Image

Note bait for scale.

***
more: https://earthsky.org/earth/giant-reptil ... acc1bdc5b0
https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and- ... ller-whale
weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Study finds 107-million-year-old pterosaur bones are oldest in Australia
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-million-y ... ralia.html
by Curtin University

A team of researchers have confirmed that 107-million-year-old pterosaur bones discovered more than 30 years ago are the oldest of their kind ever found in Australia, providing a rare glimpse into the life of these powerful, flying reptiles that lived among the dinosaurs.

Published in the journal Historical Biology and completed in collaboration with Museums Victoria, the research analyzed a partial pelvis bone and a small wing bone discovered by a team led by Museums Victoria Research Institute's Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Dr. Tom Rich and Professor Pat Vickers-Rich at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia in the late 1980s.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Spinosaur Britain: Multiple species likely roamed Cretaceous Britain
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-spinosaur ... oamed.html
by Darren Naish, PeerJ
Analysis of a British spinosaur tooth by paleontologists at the EvoPalaeoLab of the University of Southampton shows that several distinct spinosaur groups inhabited Cretaceous Britain.

Stored within the collections of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery in East Sussex, the fossil that forms the basis of the new study was gifted to the museum in 1889. It was collected from the local Lower Cretaceous rocks of the Wealden Supergroup, a thick, complicated rock sequence deposited across south-eastern England between 140 and 125 million years ago.

The Wealden is famous for its spinosaur fossils. Baryonyx—discovered in the Wealden of Surrey in 1983—is one of the world's most significant spinosaur specimens, since it was the first to reveal the true appearance of this crocodile-headed, fish-eating group. Less impressive spinosaur remains—isolated teeth—are common throughout the Wealden, and have often been identified as belonging to Baryonyx.

However, some experts have long suspected that this is incorrect, and such is confirmed by the new study published in PeerJ.

"We used a variety of techniques to identify this specimen, in order to test whether isolated spinosaur teeth could be referred to Baryonyx," said lead author Chris Barker, whose Ph.D. focuses on the spinosaurs of southern Britain. "The tooth did not group with Baryonyx in any of our data runs. It must belong to a different type of spinosaur."
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Ancient 5.5-Million-Year-OId “Elephant Graveyard” Discovered In Northern Florida
by Russell Moul
June 2, 2023

Introduction:
(IFL Science) A team of researchers and volunteers at the Florida Museum of Natural History have discovered an ancient “elephant graveyard” containing the fossilized remains of a long-extinct ancestor to our modern-day pachyderms. The find may also provide the largest known specimen of the animal ever discovered in Florida.

Sometimes around 5.5 million years ago, a number of gomphotheres, an extinct ancestor to elephants, died in or around a now vanished prehistoric river in northern Florida. Although it is likely that the animals died at different times, some hundreds of years apart, their bodies nevertheless ended up deposited in the same location where they were entombed until early 2022.

At the time, the team found parts of gomphothere skeletons in the Montbrook Fossil Dig, which was nothing special. Fragments and isolated bones had been found there in the past, so there was no reason to suspect that anything unusual was happening. Then, a few days later, volunteers unearthed what appeared to be a huge articulated foot. Subsequent work revealed it to be an ulna and radius belonging to a large gomphothere. Soon, they had recovered an entire skeleton. It was an extremely exciting discovery for the team.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. “It’s the most complete gomphothere skeleton from this time period in Florida and among the best in North America.”

Soon after, however, it became clear that the deceased animal was not alone. In the end, the team recovered entire skeletons from one adult and at least seven juveniles.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/ancient-55- ... ida-69220
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caltrek
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New Dino, ‘Iani,’ Was Face of a Changing Planet
by Tracey Peake
June 7, 2023

Introduction:
(NC State University) A newly discovered plant-eating dinosaur may have been a species’ “last gasp” during a period when Earth’s warming climate forced massive changes to global dinosaur populations.

The specimen, named Iani smithi after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of change, was an early ornithopod, a group of dinosaurs that ultimately gave rise to the more commonly known duckbill dinosaurs such as Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus. Researchers recovered most of the juvenile dinosaur’s skeleton – including skull, vertebrae and limbs – from Utah’s Cedar Mountain Formation.

Iani smithi lived in what is now Utah during the mid-Cretaceous, approximately 99 million years ago. The dinosaur’s most striking feature is its powerful jaw, with teeth designed for chewing through tough plant material.

Read more here: https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/06/new-dino ... -planet/

Don't mourn, organize.

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weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Remains of new species of duck-billed dinosaur found in Chile
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Remains of a species of herbivorous dinosaur previously unknown in the southern hemisphere have been discovered in Chile, challenging long-held beliefs about the range of duck-billed dinosaurs, scientists said Friday.

Measuring up to four meters (13 feet) in length and weighing a ton, Gonkoken nanoi lived 72 million years ago in the extreme south of what is now Chilean Patagonia.
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-species-d ... chile.html
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