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

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150 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Had Uniquely Long Legs Never Seen Before

Leggy, bouffant, and serving cloaca.

RACHAEL FUNNELL

A uniquely leggy dinosaur dating back 150 million years may have adapted to swamp life by evolving to have a lower leg twice as long as its thigh. The trait has never been seen in dinosaurs before and indicates this new-to-science species was either an extremely fast runner or used to wade through swampy environments hunting for turtles and fish.

The bizarre species was described following the discovery of a fossil retrieved from from Zhenghe County, Fujian Province, and has been named Fujianvenator prodigiosus. “Fujian” derives from the Mandarin for where the holotype was found, “venator” from the Latin for hunter, and “prodigiosus” is in honor of its unique and peculiar legs, being Latin for bizarre.

It sits within the Avialae clade that’s comprised of all modern birds – but not Deinonychus or Troodon – and dates back to the Jurassic, an era from which we have a limited diversity of fossils to work from. This makes our bizarre leggy dino a valuable fossil, as it can provide new insights into the evolution of the avialan body plan, and it’s already provided some surprises.

"Our comparative analyses show that marked changes in body plan occurred along the early avialan line, which is largely driven by the forelimb, eventually giving rise to the typical bird limb proportion," said Dr Wang Min from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, lead and corresponding author of the study, in a statement. "However, Fujianvenator is an odd species that diverged from this main trajectory and evolved bizarre hindlimb architecture."

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/150-million- ... fore-70577

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Scientists Discover Skull of Giant Predator Long Before The Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs have a reputation for being the most terrifying prehistoric predators, but a newly discovered skull sheds light on a fearsome beast that dominated 40 million years before the first 'terrible lizards' walked the Earth.

The 265-million-year-old fossil found in Brazil reveals the largest meat eater of its time, one that prowled the jungles searching for unlucky critters to chomp on.

"This animal was a gnarly-looking beast, and it must have evoked sheer dread in anything that crossed its path," says Harvard University paleontologist Stephanie Pierce.

An almost-complete fossilized skull of Pampaphoneus biccai measuring almost 36 cm (14.2 inches) was discovered along with skeletal bones near São Gabriel in Southern Brazil.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... -dinosaurs

[wjfox]

New Simulations Shed Light on Origins of Saturn’s Rings and Icy Moons

Sep 26, 2023

On a clear night, with a decent amateur telescope, Saturn and its series of remarkable rings can be seen from Earth’s surface. But how did those rings come to be? And what can they tell us about Saturn and its moons, one of the potential locations NASA hopes to search for life? A new series of supercomputer simulations has offered an answer to the mystery of the rings’ origins – one that involves a massive collision, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

According to new research by NASA and its partners, Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the debris of two icy moons that collided and shattered a few hundred million years ago. Debris that didn’t end up in the rings could also have contributed to the formation of some of Saturn’s present-day moons.

“There’s so much we still don’t know about the Saturn system, including its moons that host environments that might be suitable for life,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “So, it’s exciting to use big simulations like these to explore in detail how they could have evolved.”

NASA’s Cassini mission helped scientists understand just how young – astronomically speaking – Saturn’s rings and probably some of its moons are. And that knowledge opened up new questions about how they formed.

To learn more, the research team turned to the Durham University location of the Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) supercomputing facility in the United Kingdom. They modeled what different collisions between precursor moons might have looked like. These simulations were conducted at a resolution more than 100 times higher than previous such studies, using the open-source simulation code, SWIFT, and giving scientists their best insights into the Saturn system’s history.

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/new-s ... icy-moons/

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Fossilized skulls reveal relatives of today's rhinos had no horn and died out 5 million years ago
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-fossilize ... hinos.html
by University of Tübingen

Paleontologists from Tübingen have redefined a rhinoceros genus that had fallen into oblivion: Eochilotherium lived more than 5 million years ago and did not have a horn on its nose. Hornless rhinos were known to be ancestors of today's species.

An international research team from Germany, Greece, Bulgaria and South Africa shows, in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, that these animals were more diverse than previously thought. Panagiotis Kampouridis of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen re-examined the fossil skulls of hornless rhinos.

[Time_Traveller]

Scientists finally discover 'lost continent' thought to have vanished without a trace

about 4 hours ago

The mystery of what happened to a lost continent that seemingly vanished 155 million years ago may have finally been solved, after scientists unearthed evidence of the landmass and retraced its steps.

It turns out the lost continent, known as Argoland, had a messy divorce from western Australia. It disintegrated as tectonic forces stretched the landmass out and drove it away from the rest of the continent, before scattering it across Southeast Asia, a new study has found.

Researchers have long known that a landmass rifted from Australia 155 million years ago, thanks to clues left in the geology of a deep ocean basin known as the Argo Abyssal Plain off the country's northwest coast.

But unlike India, which broke off the ancient supercontinent Gondwana 120 million years ago and still forms an intact landmass today, Argoland splintered into fragments. And until now, scientists were left scratching their heads as to where those continental fragments ended up.

"We knew it had to be somewhere north of Australia, so we expected to find it in Southeast Asia," lead study author Eldert Advokaat, a researcher in the department of Earth sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.

https://www.space.com/lost-continent-fi ... CueojB79AA

[wjfox]

Scientists finally discover 'lost continent' thought to have vanished without a trace



https://www.space.com/lost-continent-fi ... CueojB79AA

Fascinating!

[wjfox]

4.5 billion years ago, another planet crashed into Earth. We may have found its leftovers.

A Mars-size object called Theia smashed into Earth, and the debris coalesced into the moon. Now scientists believe they may have identified pieces of Theia at the bottom of Earth’s mantle.

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1, 2023

Some 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system was a giant game of cosmic pinball. During those early ages, a planetary body the size of Mars slammed into the still-forming Earth. The collision was so powerful, it broke apart that impacting protoplanet, nicknamed Theia, and sent huge amounts of material into orbit around Earth—material that eventually coalesced into the moon.

A new study suggests that during this impact, Theia left some of its material at the surface of the still-forming Earth, and that debris sank into our planet. Published in the journal Nature, the study finds that today, material from Theia may account for two enormous, dense chunks in Earth’s mantle.

Earth scientists have known for decades that continent-size blobs of denser material exist toward the base of the mantle near the boundary with the core. This new study, by Caltech geophysicist Qian Yuan and colleagues, uses simulations of the moon-forming impact as well as the evolution of Earth’s interior to address where the impactor’s leftovers may be hiding, and how they may have changed over time.

“It's a very exciting and provocative result,” says planetary scientist Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who was not part of the study. “It would mean that we have material that can tell us more about Theia and help us better understand … the moon-forming impact.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... rth-mantle



ILLUSTRATION BY HONGPING DENG, HANGZHOU SPHERE STUDIO

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Recent fossil discovery suggests the first dinosaur egg was leathery
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-fossil-di ... thery.html
by Li Yuan, Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery of several exceptionally preserved reproduction-related dinosaur specimens over the last three decades has improved our knowledge of dinosaur reproductive biology. Nevertheless, due to limited fossil evidence and a lack of quantitative analysis on a broad phylogenetic scale, much about dinosaur reproduction remained unclear, especially pre-Cretaceous evolutionary history.

[caltrek]

Scientists Just Recreated the Chemical Reaction That May Have Led to Life on Earth
by Quoc Phuong Tran
November 15, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) How did life begin? How did chemical reactions on the early Earth create complex, self-replicating structures that developed into living things as we know them?

According to one school of thought, before the current era of DNA-based life, there was a kind of molecule called RNA (or ribonucleic acid). RNA – which is still a crucial component of life today – can replicate itself and catalyse other chemical reactions.

But RNA molecules themselves are made from smaller components called ribonucleotides. How would these building blocks have formed on the early Earth, and then combined into RNA?

Chemists like me are trying to recreate the chain of reactions required to form RNA at the dawn of life, but it's a challenging task. We know whatever chemical reaction created ribonucleotides must have been able to happen in the messy, complicated environment found on our planet billions of years ago.

I have been studying whether "autocatalytic" reactions may have played a part. These are reactions that produce chemicals that encourage the same reaction to happen again, which means they can sustain themselves in a wide range of circumstances.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientist ... on-earth