No, it’s not a movie on the SyFy channel (not yet, anyway). A paleontologist has found the fossil remains of a 300 million year old shark in New Mexico that looks enough like Godzilla, that they’ve named the thing after the iconic movie monster. Isn’t this how at least one of the Godzilla movies began?
More “news of the weird” today comes from the paleontology world. A fully preserved female mammoth was discovered by Russian scientists in Siberia recently. The specimen was complete with good quality muscle tissue and actual blood that still flowed freely from the mummified corpse. This discovery furthers the concept of one day cloning a mammoth or other prehistoric species. Of course, I beg the question again: haven’t people seen Jurassic Park?
The female mammoth, now named Lyuba, was found beneath the ice on the Lyakhovsky Islands, the southernmost group of the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic seas of northeastern Russia. The blood was found pooled in the ice cavities located just below the belly of the beast. The unusual fact about this blood is that even at a temperature of 10C below zero the fluid flowed freely when the cavities were punctured with a poll pick.
“It can be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryo-protective properties,” said Semyon Grigoriev, head of the Museum of Mammoths of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North at the North Eastern Federal University as cited by Interfax news agency.
A bacteriological analysis is currently being conducted on the blood sample. It has also been reported that the muscle tissue was so well-preserved that it had the consistency and appearance of fresh red meat. This is due to the fact that the lower half of the animal was trapped beneath pure ice. Scientists estimate the age of the mammoth, which lived approximately 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, to have been between 50 and 60 at the time of its death.
Results from the bacteriological analysis are expected back in late July.
Recently scientists discovered a clutch of 150-million-year-old fossil eggs that may be an important “missing link” in evolutionary history. The eggs are dated to be from the Late Jurassic period and contain actual fossilized embryos. This find allows paleontologists a rare insight into the early lives of a group of dinosaurs known as theropods, which include the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds. The discovery also addresses questions of about which shells came from which particular species.
“Most of the time, you find eggs without the embryos, or the embryos without the eggs,” said said Ricardo Araújo to National Geographic. Araújo is a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and lead author of the new study.
The majority of fossilized eggs found up until now have been from the Cretaceous period—about 80 million years ago. The gap between the Cretaceous period and the Early Jurassic period (190 million years ago) has confounded scientists, leaving them without the necessary information to make concrete conclusions about the “bird like” qualities seen in the later dinosaur species. These qualities are believed to have occurred during the gap between the Late Jurassic period and Cretaceous period. The newly discovered clutch of theropod eggs and embryos are exactly what paleontologists needed to solve the evolutionary mystery.
The theropod eggs belong to a group called Trovosaurus, which are extremely porous, leading scientists to believe the eggs were at one time buried. The pores allowed gas exchange between the inside and outside of the egg while underground. The embryos found inside the theropod eggs were formed enough to have significant skeletal structure. This means that the eggs are from a very late stage of incubation, possibly the last week of development before they would have hatched—another impressive aspect of this particular scientific discovery.
The more we dig into our Earth’s history, the more realize we barely know anything about it at all. Paleontologists have discovered dinosaur fossils that date back 10-15 MILLION years further than all previous specimens we have, which is incredible!
EurekAlert! writes:
Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tail, that walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs like the small, swift-footed Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.
The findings mean that the dinosaur lineage appeared 10 million to 15 million years earlier than fossils previously showed, originating in the Middle Triassic rather than in the Late Triassic period.
“If the newly named Nyasasaurus parringtoni is not the earliest dinosaur, then it is the closest relative found so far,” according to Sterling Nesbitt, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in biology and lead author of a paper published online Dec. 5 in Biology Letters, a journal of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.
“For 150 years, people have been suggesting that there should be Middle Triassic dinosaurs, but all the evidence is ambiguous,” he said. “Some scientists used fossilized footprints, but we now know that other animals from that time have a very similar foot. Other scientists pointed to a single dinosaur-like characteristic in a single bone, but that can be misleading because some characteristics evolved in a number of reptile groups and are not a result of a shared ancestry.”
The researchers had one humerus – or upper arm bone – and six vertebrae to work with. They determined that the animal likely stood upright, measured 7 to 10 feet in length (2 to 3 meters), was as tall as 3 feet at the hip (1 meter) and may have weighed between 45 and 135 pounds (20 to 60 kilograms).
Read more at eurekalert.org
This is just one of the many reasons I will not go into any amount of water I can’t see the bottom of.
A giant prehistoric whale that was capable of eating other whales has been discovered by Paleontologists in Peru, with teeth that are over a foot long used to eat whales the size of some of the biggest ones alive today!
Discovery News writes:
The massive skull and jaw of a 13-million-year-old sperm whale has been discovered eroding from the windblown sands of a coastal desert of Peru.
The extinct cousin of the modern sperm whale is the first fossil to rival modern sperm whales in size — although this is a very different beast, say whale evolution experts.
“We could see it from very far,” said paleontologist Olivier Lambert of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, who led the team which found the fossil.
The giant 3-meter (10-foot) skull of what’s been dubbed Leviathan melvillei (in honor of the author of “Moby Dick”) was found with teeth in its top and bottom jaws up to 36 centimeters (14 inches) long. The discovery is reported in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature.
Read more at news.discovery.com
