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

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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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Two New Dinosaur Species, Almost as Large as a Blue Whale, Discovered in China
by Jessie Yeung
Updated August 12, 2021

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/12/chin ... k-scli-scn

Introduction:
(CNN)Scientists have confirmed the discovery of two massive new dinosaur species in northwest China -- some of the first vertebrates uncovered in the region, according to a new study published Thursday.

A number of fossils have emerged from China's northwest region in recent years, including Xinjiang and the Turpan-Hami Basin. The fossils include a number of pterosaurs (flying reptiles), preserved eggs and embryos -- as well as fossil fragments of spinal vertebrae and rib cages, which scientists initially identified as belonging to three mystery dinosaurs.

The researchers have since determined that two of those specimens were from previously unknown species, which they have named Silutitan sinensis -- "silu" meaning "Silk Road" in Mandarin -- and Hamititan xinjiangensis, a nod to the region where it was found. Both incorporate the Greek word "titan," which means "giant," in reference to their size.

The Silutitan specimen is estimated to be over 20 meters (65.6 feet) long, while the Hamititan specimen was 17 meters (55.77 feet) long. That makes the dinosaurs almost as large as blue whales, which range from 23 to 30 meters (75 to 98 feet), depending on the hemisphere they're located in.

The researchers, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Brazil, published their findings in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature family of journals
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An artist's illustration showing Silutitan sinensis (left) and Hamititan xinjiangensis (right), with other theropods and dinosaur species in the surroundings.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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A Chunk From The Sunken Continent of Zealandia Is Twice as Old as We Thought
14 AUGUST 2021

Image

About 3,500 feet under the South Pacific sits a piece of land 2 million square miles in size – about half as big as Australia.

But scientists can't agree on whether this submerged landmass, called Zealandia, is a continent or not. A team of geologists declared it one in 2017, but not all researchers are convinced.

"It's not like a mountain, country, or planet. There is no formal body to approve a continent," Nick Mortimer, a geologist from New Zealand's GNS Science who led the 2017 group, told Insider.

While the definition of a continent is contentious, Mortimer's group suggested that a continent should have clearly defined boundaries, occupy an area greater than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers), be elevated above the surrounding ocean crust, and have a continental crust thicker than that oceanic crust.

The results showed that crust was once part of another supercontinent known as Rodinia, which formed between 1.3 billion and 900 million years ago.

In other words, Zealandia's geologic history starts far earlier than 500 million years ago.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-portion- ... 7-RRbGdX_A
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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How a Brazilian Police Raid Led to the Discovery of An "Exceptional" Ancient Fossil
by Tara Yarlagadda
August 25, 2021

https://www.inverse.com/science/police- ... nal-fossil

Introduction:
(Inverse) BRAZIL’S NATIONAL POLICE force typically makes headlines for their deadly drug busts and cracking down on illegal arms deals.
But in 2013, the Federal Police had a more unusual target in mind: ancient fossils dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

The Federal Police conducted a sweeping investigation into the country’s illegal fossil trade, ultimately recovering more than 3,000 fossil specimens from the Brazilian states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro.

One of the specimens was a tapejarid fossil neatly preserved in limestone rock. The fossil belongs to the species Tupandactylus navigans.

The Tapejaridae clade were unusual, toothless, Cretaceous-era pterosaurs. They’re known for their large crested heads, which scientists theorize may have been used as a “sail.”
From the journal Plos One:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0254789
(Plos One) A remarkably well-preserved, almost complete and articulated new specimen (GP/2E 9266) of Tupandactylus navigans is here described for the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation of Brazil. The new specimen comprises an almost complete skeleton, preserving both the skull and post-cranium, associated with remarkable preservation of soft tissues, which makes it the most complete tapejarid known thus far. CT-Scanning was performed to allow the assessment of bones still covered by sediment.
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An artist’s rendering of Tupandactylus navigans based on the newly discovered fossil.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Newly identified mosasaur was fish-hunting monster

by Michael Miller, University of Cincinnati
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-newly-mos ... nster.html
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati identified a new species of mosasaur—an 18-foot-long fish-eating monster that lived 80 million years ago.

UC assistant professor-educator Takuya Konishi and his student, UC graduate Alexander Willman, named the mosasaur Ectenosaurus everhartorum after paleontologists Mike and Pamela Everhart. The mosasaur inhabited the Western Interior Seaway in what today is western Kansas.

The discovery was announced this week in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The newly identified mosasaur marks only the second species in the genus Ectenosaurus.

"Mosasaurs in western Kansas have been well sampled and well researched. Those two factors create tall odds when you try to find something new," Konishi said.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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How Small Was The Universe At The Start Of The Big Bang?

Aug 25, 2021,02:00am EDT

TL;DR –

After 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds = 1.5 metre radius
After 1 trillionth of a second = 1 AU
After 1 second = 10 light years
After 3 years = 100,000 light years
After 10,000 years = 10 million light years

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... 5e18ad5f79


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

Post by raklian »

At one point, you could wrap your arms around the entire universe. lol

But then, as an habitant within it, it looks as if everything is static. That's general relativity for you.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-massive-a ... rgess.html
by Royal Ontario Museum

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil species belonging to an extinct animal group in half-a-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. The findings were announced on September 8, 2021, in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Named Titanokorys gainesi, this new species is remarkable for its size. With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.

"The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found," says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM's Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Who was king before tyrannosaurus? Uzbek fossil reveals new top dino

by University of Tsukuba
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-king-tyra ... veals.html
Iconic tyrannosauroids like T. rex famously dominated the top of the food web at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. But they didn't always hold that top spot.

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba has described a new genus and species belonging to the Carcharodontosauria, a group of medium- to large-sized carnivorous dinosaurs that preceded the tyrannosauroids as apex predators.

The new dinosaur, named Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was found in the lower Upper Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan, and therefore lived about 90 million years ago. Two separate evolutionary analyses support classification of the new dinosaur as the first definitive carcharodontosaurian discovered in the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia.

"We described this new genus and species based on a single isolated fossil, a left maxilla, or upper jawbone," explains study first author Assistant Professor Kohei Tanaka. "Among theropod dinosaurs, the size of the maxilla can be used to estimate the animal's size because it correlates with femur length, a well-established indicator of body size. Thus, we were able to estimate that Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis had a mass of over 1,000 kg, and was approximately 7.5 to 8.0 meters in length, greater than the length of a full-grown African elephant."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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The World's Oldest Known Forest Was Not Like We Imagined, New Study Shows
by Carly Cassella
September 10, 2021

https://www.sciencealert.com/study-give ... ooked-like

Introduction:
(Science Alert) The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.

The picture they have painted couldn't be more different to what now sits in its place. Near the small town of Cairo in upstate New York, under an old highway department quarry, scientists have reconstructed the remains of what was a mighty and mature old-growth forest – home to at least three of the world's earliest tree-like plants.

Some of these initial tree 'wannabes' (known as cladoxylopsids) would have looked like large stalks of celery, shooting 10 meters (32 feet) into the sky. Others resembled pine trees, but with hairy, fern-like fronds for leaves (Archaeopteris). The third long-lost plant would have taken after the palm tree, with a bulbous base and canopy of fern-like branches (Eospermatopteris).

Seven parallel cross-sections of the Cairo site have researchers thinking these primordial trees were quite old and large. As such, they were not packed densely together, but were relatively scattered across a floodplain which ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

Dry periods were a regular part of the cycle, and yet the Cairo forest, which traced the Catskill river, seemed to host primitive trees we once thought could only survive in swamps or river deltas. These tree-like plants belong to the genus Eospermatopteris, and they look sort of like tall ferns standing on bulbous stumps.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Prehistoric winged lizard unearthed in Chile
Fossils confirmed to be of a rhamphorhynchine pterosaur—the first such creature to be found in Gondwana, the prehistoric supercontinent that later formed the southern hemisphere landmasses.

Chilean scientists have announced the discovery of the first-ever southern hemisphere remains of a type of Jurassic-era "winged lizard" known as a pterosaur.

Fossils of the dinosaur which lived some 160 million years ago in what is today the Atacama desert, were unearthed in 2009.

They have now been confirmed to be of a rhamphorhynchine pterosaur—the first such creature to be found in Gondwana, the prehistoric supercontinent that later formed the southern hemisphere landmasses.

Researcher Jhonatan Alarcon of the University of Chile said the creatures had a wingspan of up to two meters, a long tail, and pointed snout.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-prehistor ... chile.html
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