Dinosaur news

[Thorondor 33]

Who would want to search for dinosaurs in the Antartica?

[thetyrantlizard]

Antarctica is the last unexplored continent for dinosaurs. I suspect there are dozens, if not hundreds, of unknown species, especially dating after the break-up of Gondwana. If only the ice would melt...

[richard]

If only the ice would melt hundreds of miles of land would disappear ;D But there might be a lot of fossils like the Leaellynasaura, that lived in the Antarctica, when it was jointed to Australia and New Zealand

[thetyrantlizard]

A new species of Carcharodontosaurus has been formally described from remains collected in 1997 in Niger.

[thetyrantlizard]

Here's an interesting tidbit from the Dinomummy book that was not discussed in any of the news articles about Dakota the edmontosaurus (Most of them nattered on and on and on about the scales, for some reason. I'm not sure why anyone was astonished at the fact that dinosaurs had scaly skin. Perhaps they were expecting feathers? ;D ). It turns out that the arms or forelimbs of edmontosaurs did not possess hooflike fingernails--which means they were not designed to bear heavy loads. This may imply that hadrosaurs are once again obligatory bipeds, at least most of the time (the caption reads that the 'delicate' hands could 'occasionally' bear some weight), contrary to most modern reconstructions which feature quadrupedal hadrosaurs, not to mention the CGI in the book itself. So those supposedly outdated early 20th-century murals featuring corythosaurs etc. standing on their hind legs apparently had the right idea after all.

What is old is new again Hopefully the same thing will happen to the 'feathered' 'dromaeosaurs' too (sorry, dinotoyblog ;D ) Perhaps the sauropods will eventually be returned to the swamps that they considered home ;D

[thetyrantlizard]

And the fact that Dakota's tail was larger than the tail vertebrae would indicate implies something about dinosaur toys too. Most 'modern' figures have the dinosaur's skin so tightly wrapped and pulled around the bones that one could literally count the number of ribs and neck vertebrae, as in my Kinto "Favorite Collection" Brontosaur (apatosaur, schmapatosaur ;D ). Now they'll have to go back to making big bulky dinosaurs again. No more liposuctioned sauropods or hadrosaurs on weight-loss programs ;D The news is getting better all the time ;D

[thetyrantlizard]

By the way, Jack Horner has been quoted as complaining that Dakota has not been peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal, so it is just 'hearsay' and part of the 'crazy stuff' that is 'out there'. Pretty thick coming from the guy who without any evidence proclaims tyrannosaurus rex to be an obligate scavenger , perhaps the most preposterous idea in palaeontological history (well, the second most preposterous )

[Thorondor 33]

Jack Horner is such a flake. When I did the dino talk at the grade 2 class last spring, I was not to kind when I spoke about Horner. ;D When I do the talk next year, I will again bash the man!

[richard]

I can't stand Horner

[richard]

Canadian museum unveils long lost dinosaur
news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071212/sc_nm/dinosaur_dc;_ylt=AlcFjRycb4rw8b9SxkTCnUl7hMgF

[thetyrantlizard]

Of all the preposterous theories purportedly explaining the demise of the dinosaurs, the latest takes the cake--insects did the dinosaurs in. Yup, insects. The authors of the 'study' seem to forget that insects were around long before the archosaurs evolved, and that dinosaurs flourished for over a hundred million years alongside them. Now they are claiming tyrannosaurs were done to death by a flurry of mosquitoes? Has there been ANY taxa in the whole history of the Vertebrata which can be proved to have disappeared because of insect bites? The authors even claim the dinosaurs died of diarrhea! They found nematodes and intestinal parasites in dino poop--do they mean there are no such parasites now? If there are, why isn't Class Mammalia going extinct? Dinosaurs also apparently weren't able to develop immune systems! What poppycock! Were mosasaurs and elasmosaurs pecked to death too?

The authors even said that by helping spread flowering plants, pollinating insects could have cut off the dinosaurs' food supply. What? They haven't heard of adaptation and co-evolution? It is pretty obvious that hadrosaurs evolved precisely to take advantage of these new food sources. The authors make the extremely dubious claim that the dinosaurs were in terminal decline before the end of the Cretaceous--on the contrary, dinosaurs were rapidly diversifying and evolving new species as Laurasia and Gondwana continued splitting apart.

This sort of research is what gives science a bad name.

[dinotoyblog]

As far as I am aware, this 'theory' has only been published in the form of a book outside of the scientific community and exempt from the peer review system? If so, that's a big red flag.

[thetyrantlizard]

Yup, it's a book titled "What Bugged the Dinosaurs?" by George & Roberta Poinar, who are apparently experts in amber. Technically speaking it hasn't been peer reviewed, but other paleontologists have given glowing reviews and blurbs, such as Michael Benton (who ought to have known better) -- "This is an excellent book" -- and Timothy Showalter -- "It develops the intriguing and plausible hypothesis that insects contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs."

All this praise despite the fact that I can dispute every single statement made by George Poinar Jr in his press release! For instance, he says he found 'evidence' of organisms that could cause dysentery in dino poop. Well, one is hardly surprised that dinosaurs occasionally had tummy aches, but it is a wild and untenable leap to argue that, unlike mammals and reptiles, dinosaurs had 'no natural immunity' to such diseases.

He then argues that these diseases would have killed off small local populations of dinosaurs.That is true, then and now--but to say that the dinosaur populations would therefore not recover from such decimations is something else entirely. Even I know that if a pathogen is extremely lethal to its hosts, the pathogen itself is in trouble, because it would not be able to reproduce quickly enough to find another host--and therefore natural selection itself would take care of the matter by letting the pathogen go extinct or rendering it less fatal to its hosts. It is deeply embarrassing that a zoologist and supposed expert on tropical diseases such as Poinar Jr. would not realize this!

And he makes the audacious claim that dinosaurs survived for thousands of years after the K-T boundary. That there has not been a single verifiable bone to substantiate such a claim apparently doesn't faze him. There is even less evidence for his assertion that the dinosaurs were in decline for millions of years. Far from it--till the very end of the Cretaceous dinosaurs were diversifying, and everyone who has actually bothered to count the number of fossils extant knows that there was NO decline in dinosaur numbers before the K-T event. Tyrannosaurus, Alamosaurus, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, Anatotitan/Edmontosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, etc. remains have been found close to the very end of the Cretaceous--are these dinosaurs somehow failures, or relict members of a declining clade? Far from it--these dinosaurs were larger and more powerful than their immediate predecessors.

And the idea that dinosaurs were averse to eating angiosperms, which caused their decline, is simply absurd. Flowering plants evolved at least 100 mya, so dinosaurs co-existed with them for at least 35 million years, and very likely longer, since of course the first appearance of the flowering plants in the fossil record does not mean we know what was the first angiosperm ever. So after millions of years of gorging on flowering plants the ceratopsians and hadrosaurs suddenly decided flowering plants didn't taste good and dropped dead? What kind of logic is that? And how does he explain the simultaneous disappearance of Quetzalcoatlus? Were there deep-sea mosquitoes that plagued the elasmosaurs to death? Was Tylosaurus on a strict fern-cycad diet?

How, moreover, does Poinar explain the titanosaur coprolite that contained unmistakable traces of grass? These coprolites also contained evidence that titanosaurs ate the broad-leaved angiosperms. So the spread of flowering plants by the insects that pollinated them did NOT contribute to the demise of the dinosaurs! On the contrary, it gave them something new to eat. Kenneth Carpenter in fact attributes the rise of the strange wide-mouthed titanosaurs (Bonitasaura, nigersaurus) to grass and other low-lying vegetation.

If the Poinars merely stated that insects and the diseases they spread posed a problem for the dinosaurs, there would be no dispute. Of course insects, then and now, spread diseases. For them however to state that the Deccan traps and the Chixulub (sp) meteor were rather insignificant events that contributed less to the demise of the dinosaurs than widespread saurian diarrhea is another matter altogether.

[thetyrantlizard]

In other news: the widely circulated report last year about tyrannosaur proteins found in t-rex bone, which was then used to allegedly 'prove' that tyrannosaurs were related to birds, has been questioned.

www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5859/33c

The abstract is unbearably technical, so only dinotoyblog here can fully comprehend what the writers are saying , but here's the money quote:

The unusual, fragmented nature of the reported T. rex sequence does not make it amenable to standard, model-based phylogenetic analysis.

In other words, the alleged t-rex protein sequences are useless in determining whether t-rexes are related to chickens, frogs, or soccer players. The study also notes that the purported t-rex 'organic' tissue was probably contaminated with extraneous proteins during the 'analysis'.

[thetyrantlizard]

So much for protein analysis: based on the purportedly 'organic' 'tyrannosaur' tissue found in the tyrannosaur bone, dinosaurs are really overgrown salamanders:



That's what you get when you put somebody like Jack Horner in charge of anything ;D