Kulindadromeus Zabaikalicus: A Cute Little Dinosaur

That incredibly cute critter is what Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus might look like: in an Arisa manga comic.

Maybe someone will write the heartwarming tale of a Kulindadromeus — named Kuddly Zeke??

Or maybe not.

Dinosaur Feathers

Until paleontologists found Kulindadromeus, a dinosaur that lived where Siberia is now, scientists knew that some dinosaurs had feathers: but had only found them on theropods.

Scientists are still pretty sure that Coelurosaurs, a particular sort of theropod, are the distant ancestors of birds. Oddly enough, though: theropods have lizard-like hips, or did.

Kulindaromeus is an Ornithischian: one of the 'bird-hipped' dinosaurs. It wasn't, the Lemming understands, just feathers that pegged theropods as the dinosaurs that eventually gave the birdseed industry a reason for existence: and that's another topic.

As far as the Lemming knows, there is no "Sir Richard Owen Zoological gardens." Not yet, anyway. Richard Owen did, however, give Mesozoic reptiles a name: Dinosauria. That was before other scientists realized that they weren't, or weren't quite, reptiles, and that's yet another topic.


(From Chris Masna, via Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol; used w/o permission.)
("Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus reconstruction by Chris Masna, non-threatening occupant of the Sir Richard Owen Zoological Gardens."
(Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol))

And no, to the best of the Lemming's knowledge: nobody has found Kulinda DNA, or grown a live dinosaur. Not yet.

Seriously, Though: That's a Cute Dinosaur

(From Andrey Atuchin, via Deptartment of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol; used w/o permission.)
(Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus in its lakeside environment.)

"Kulindadromeus, the feathered ornithischian
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol

"The first ever example of a plant-eating dinosaur with feathers and scales was reported from Russia in 2014. Previously only flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have had feathers so this new find indicates that all dinosaurs could have been feathered. This has important implications for our understanding of the biology and success of dinosaurs and for the evolution of bird characters.

"The new dinosaur, named Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus, meaning 'Kulinda runner from the Zabaikal region' as it comes from a site called Kulinda on the banks of the Olov River, in Zabaikal District, in Siberia, is described by Godefroit et al. (2014). Kulindadromeus shows epidermal scales on its tail and shins, and short bristles on its head and back. The most astonishing discovery, however, is that it also has complex, compound feathers associated with its arms and legs...."

The Lemming is pretty sure that an American would have written "...the evolution of bird characteristics...," or maybe the University of Bristol folks meant that the cute little ornithischian looks a bit like Tweety and The Road Runner. Then again, maybe not.

Not all scientists are sure that "Kulinda runner from the Zabaikal region" really had feathers. The stuff that apparently kept Kulindadromeus warm isn't shaped like bird feathers. Not the sort birds have these days, anyway.

Maybe the way scientists processed these Kulindadromeus fossils made the feathers look funny, or maybe feathers have changed in the last 150,000,000 years, or maybe some of Earth's critters grow hair or fur, some sprout feathers, and some kept warm with — something else.

If you haven't read enough about dinosaurs and all that yet, there's more:

• "Fishface! Ancient Fish with a Jaw, Cheekbones, and Beady Little Eyes"
  (September 27, 2013)
• "Snakes Don't Have Legs: There's an Explanation For That"
  (February 8, 2011)
• "Ecological Disaster - a Quarter of a Billion Years Ago"
  (December 14, 2010)
• "T. Rex Tail Made For Running, Maybe"
  (November 18, 2010)
• "Dinosaurs, Three Major Asteroid Impacts, and Massive Volcanic Eruptions"
  (August 29, 2010)

Lemming Tracks: Ice Age, Global Warming, Climate Change, and Living Scared

The Lemming was born during the Truman administration. That's what it says on my birth certificate, and that's the story I'm sticking with.

I remember when civilization was going to be scraped off the face of the earth by the coming ice age. That was before most of us were going to die in the food riots and ecological disasters popularized by a butterfly expert. (April 20, 2010)

More recently, it's been acid rain and global warming that's gonna kill us all.

An informal spot-check in America's media suggests that global warming's on the way out as the Big Bad. What we're all supposed to be scared silly about now is "climate change."

Oddly enough, I think the doomsayers are right. Sort of.

The Lemming Predicts: Change

This prediction is about as close to a 100 percent sure thing as it gets: A hundred years from now, things will be different. The Lemming will go even further out on this limb: A thousand years from now, things will be different.

How can the Lemming be so confident?

For the last several billion years, change has happened. There's no reason to think that the situation has - well, changed.

Like the fellow said:

"Nothing endures but change."
(Heraclitus, 540 BC - 480 BC) (Drifting at the Edge of Time and Space (October 29, 2009))

Falcons of the Ohio Mountains

People make things. Paleontologists recently unearthed a kitchen that someone used 1,600,000 years or so back. Homo sapiens sapiens wouldn't show up for quite a while - and the kitchen didn't have a refrigerator, but it was an area set up for food preparation.

Like the Lemming said, people make things - and have for quite a long time.

More recently, we've been making buildings. Quite a lot of them. That's - change. Buildings and clusters of buildings have been popping up across the North American continent. As a sort of side-effect, peregrine falcons are now building their nests on the sides of cliff faces - in places that didn't have cliff faces a century or so back. ("Ohio's Falcon Nesting Sites," Ohio Department of Natural Resources)

So far, the Lemming hasn't run into any anguished articles about the dreadful spread of peregrine falcons. Partly, I suspect, because quite a few people like birds.

Change, Dinosaurs, and Somebody's Fault

The Lemming's mentioned this before: America's dominant culture is convinced that vast, impersonal, mindless forces have wrought great changes on the face of the earth for billions and billions of years.

Mountains rose and fell; species appeared, changed, and went extinct; steamy jungles made way for continental glaciers which in their turn melted to form new landscapes.

Change happened: lots and lots of change. And it was part of the fascinating panoply of natural phenomena which Science revealed.

Then, starting maybe a couple centuries ago, change still happened - but it was somebody's fault.

Quite often, change was the fault of the authoritarian, male-dominated, white European culture that was to blame for just about everything else. Officially. And that's another topic. Almost.

The History Channel (which covers a lot more than what's "history," strictly speaking) had a fascinating show on this morning: First Apocalypse. It's about "how we can learn from the dinosaur's fall from grace and how much our own fate may be intertwined with theirs. Are we doomed to follow in the dinosaurs footsteps or can we face down extinction?

"Perhaps this fear is why we are so fascinated by the demise of a species that lived millions of years ago. If something so large that ruled the earth for so long can be wiped out in a matter of centuries, what does that say about our ultimate survival?

"The world we live in may already be in the throws of its own mass extinction... a new apocalypse."

Sounds like the same yadda-yadda about how we're all gonna die of [insert current intellectual fashion]. Some of it is. One can't be taken seriously, these days, unless one says that we're doomed - DOOOOOMED, I TELL YOU!!!!!!

Reminds me of the 'end times' chaps and their perennial apocalypse predictions - that that's almost another topic, too.

Back to First Apocalypse. What was running on History Channel this morning (which may be the same as the video they're selling) included the usual 'big rock killed the dinosaurs' thing. But it did a pretty good job of discussing the reasons for looking beyond that Yucatan impact for explanations.

The documentary suggests that between the Deccan traps, miscellaneous other impacts, changing landscapes, climate change, disease and parasites: the dinosaurs were on their way out when that big rock came down.

There was a particularly interesting bit about a nematode somebody found in a cockroach - which had been frozen in amber. The Lemming is getting off-topic again.

Cockroaches, Climate Change, and Humanity

Remember the Black Death? About a third of Europe died.

More to the point: in that global, species-threatening mega-disaster - two thirds of Europe didn't die.

The Lemming isn't trying to minimize the scope of that tragedy. But folks who weren't killed by the Black Death picked up the pieces of their culture, developed new social structures - and eventually discovered the usefulness of penicillin.

And microbes that aren't killed by penicillin. Which is another topic.

The point? It's like the one fellow in that documentary implied: Humans are about as hard to get rid of as cockroaches.

Finally, another one of the chaps interviewed (Physics of the Impossible's author, Michio Kaku) discussed the next ice age - which he said was coming in about 10,000 years.

He could be right about that - if we're in an interglacial period, that's when the next episode of continental glaciation is due. Give or take a few millennia.

But the last I checked, the jury's still out on whether or not we're at the end of the most recent set of ice ages - or in one of the more-or-less temporary thaws.

The Lemming's guess is that we'll know for sure - in about 10,000 years. And that folks will be around to argue about it then. And that cockroaches will still be nibbling their way through time.

Related posts:

• "Lemming Tracks: My Take on 'The Future' "
  (November 8, 2010)
• "Dinosaurs, Three Major Asteroid Impacts, and Massive Volcanic Eruptions"
  (August 29, 2010)
• "Lemming Tracks: Observations by an Opportunistic Omnivore"
  (April 20, 2010)
• "Remember When We were Doomed by the Coming Ice Age?"
  (February 17, 2010)
• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!"
  (December 20, 2009)
• "That Was Close! Human Race Down to 2,000 Population"
  (April 25, 2008)
• "Sunspots? What Sunspots?"
  (April 25, 2008)
• "And Now, for Something Completely Different: The Medieval Climatic Optimum, The Little Ice Age, and Other Changes"
  (April 20, 2008)

---

More:

• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"

T. Rex Tail Made For Running, Maybe

"T. Rex Tail Built for Speed"
Jennifer Viegas, Dinosaur News, Discovery News (November 17, 2010)

"Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the world's fastest moving hunters, suggests a new study of this dinosaur's muscular tail.

"The study, published in The Anatomical Record, shows that T. rex's long tail didn't just serve to counterbalance the up-front weight of the massive carnivore's extremely large head. Paleontologists had previously suspected that was the tail's primary function.

"Instead, the new research led by University of Alberta researcher Scott Persons reveals that T. rex's powerful tail muscles helped to give this dinosaur super speed...."

We don't have any living T. rex to study, so paleontologists need to work out what the critters were like from their fossilized bones - also the occasional fossilized soft tissue, and in one case unfossilized goo.

Anyway, paleontologists compared the T. rex tail to that of contemporary reptiles like crocodiles and Komodo dragons. The T. rex tail's 'ribs' were higher than those of today's reptiles: which gave more room for muscle.

"...He now believes that previous estimates of the muscle mass in this dinosaur's tail were underestimated by up to 45 percent. This explains why earlier researchers thought T. rex was more of a plodding animal that couldn't run very fast...."

The Lemming would have liked to see more discussion on why and how a well-muscled tail translates into a faster T. rex - but I suppose it's a matter of being able to balance better? Or maybe something else. That sort of detail would have been really nice to have.

On the other hand, there's this nifty video:

"T Rex Run"

TIMELESSTHEGAME, YouTube (July 4, 2009)
video, 0:06

"The popular scientific theory is that the Tyrannosaurus, while large and fearsome, was a scavenger and not a predator. This means that it probably did very little running, and when it did, it did not entirely leave the ground. It most likely achieved a 'fast' walking pace.

"The Speed of an animal is often determined by the scale difference between the femur and the lower leg bones. Animals with shorter femurs tend to be faster while those with longer more 'human-like' leg bones are on the slow side. The T-Rex had a very large femur, nearly equal in length to it's lower leg bone. It's top speed was most likely around 17.9 mph- that's fast enough to outrun our fastest sprinters."

Okay: the critter in the video doesn't seem to be going all that fast. But remember: T. rex was big. The one in the drawing here shows the high end of T. rex size - sort of the dinosaurian equivalent of a football player. But even a 'small' T. rex would be a whole lot of animal.

Look at the video and imagine someone whose head just about reaches the T. rex's belly, and the speed becomes a little more obvious.

Somewhat-related posts:

• "Ancient Galloping Crocodile"
  (November 19, 2009)
• "Tiny T. Rex Fossil, China, Paleontology, and International Law"
  (September 18, 2009)
• "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More"
  (June 29, 2009)

Reviving Extinct Animals? Been There, Done That

"Re-Animators"
Inspired by You, Wired (undated, probably September 17, 2010)

"Ever since Steven Spielberg brought Jurassic Park to the big screen, teams of biotechnologists have been working to bring extinct animals back to life. They’ve already resurrected the Bucardo, an extinct subspecies of goat. But they’ve also got rarer game in their sights. We round up the re-animation efforts, and handicaps the odds...."

The extinct critters listed and rated are:

• Bucardo
  • A subspecies of wild goat, or Ibex.
• Aurochs
  • Massive oxen, standing six feet high at the shoulder
    • Two feet bigger than the biggest bovines of today
• Woolly Mammoth
  • Longhaired elephants, basically.
• Tasmanian Tiger
  • A marsupial with a distinctly wolf like aspect.
• Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Stegosaurus… etc.
  • All dinosaurs, obviously

Turns out, a bucardo has been cloned - but only lived seven minutes, according to Wired.

Looks like we've got a good shot at restarting aurochs and wolly mammoths. That Tasmanian tiger and the dinosaurs are - according to Wired - much less likely to get revived. Particularly the dinosaurs. Citing Jurassic Park movies, the article observes: "It was science fiction, after all."

Not, perhaps, the best argument. I can remember when people walking on the moon, industrial robots, and ray guns were "science fiction." And those examples are, respectively, in today's: history; industry; and research & development.

Related posts:

• "Livestock, Food, and Attack of the Clones"
  (August 7, 2010)
• "Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (June 29, 2009)
• "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More"
  (June 29, 2009)

Dinosaurs, Three Major Asteroid Impacts, and Massive Volcanic Eruptions

"No, Seriously, What Killed the Dinosaurs?"
Earth News, Discovery News (August 28, 2010)

"Seems like an easy one to answer: an asteroid around six miles wide slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula. Continent-wide firestorms, planet-enshrouding dust cloud, massive plant death, toxic ozone, carbon monoxide poisoning ... and that's it: one resounding mass extinction all wrapped up in a pretty, hellish package and explained by a big hole in southeastern Mexico, right?

"Well, the more scientists look, the more complicated the answer becomes. For starters, there were a series of truly enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now western India around the same time. Collectively, the Deccan Traps spewed enough noxious gas that some say it was the cause of the extinction.

"Then there's a weird crater-looking structure right next door to the Deccan Traps. If that turns out to be from an asteroid impact, it would be the largest crater found on Earth. Ever. And just this week, a study in the journal Geology reported there may have been yet another impact, in the Ukraine....."

The Discovery News article does a pretty good job of summing up what we know - what we don't know, but can make educated guesses about - and what we quite simply don't know about what happened about 65,000,000 years back when the dinosaurs stopped living.

The two big hits - the one in what's now the Yucatan Peninsula and the other (probable) impact west of where Mumbai, India is today - apparently happened just a few thousand years apart, but not simultaneously. Which raises some questions:

"...The odds of the two rocks being part of a binary system is small -- if they were, they should have hit simultaneously. But they're still suspiciously close together, suggesting that perhaps some great collision in the solar system sent a scatter-shot of space rocks headed our way.

"Meanwhile, we still have to contend with the Shiva structure, a 500 km-wide gouge in the planet off India that could be the scar left by an asteroid several times bigger than the one that caused the Chicxulub crater...."

Add that smaller impact in what's now the Ukraine, and you've got three impacts around the same time: small; medium; and large. Maybe no one of them would have caused enough trouble to kill off the dinosaurs: but all three, only a few thousand years apart? Add the Deccan Traps eruptions, and you've got something like a Hollywood disaster flick: only spread out over a few millennia.

The Lemming was impressed with the last two paragraphs of the article:

"...It's even been suggested that the Chicxulub impact caused the Deccan Traps to erupt, by way of a huge earthquake that rippled through the planet.

"Such ideas may sound a little ludicrous, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Life is, generally speaking, very resilient, and dinosaurs were no exception. It would have taken a huge cataclysm -- maybe even several in quick succession -- to end their over 150-million-year reign on Earth."

It's a bit of relief to see that someone's been paying attention. Over the third-of-a-billion or so years that things have been growing on Earth, we've had asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions (real eruptions: not that little Mount St. Helens firecracker), and the occasional ice age. If life were the delicate thing that the more strident 'and we're all gonna die' folks seem to think, we wouldn't be here.

Related posts:

• "Asteroid Crater Under the Timor Sea: It Could Happen Again"
  (June 3, 2010)
• "Asteroids and Earth: Time for the Space Patrol?"
  (May 2, 2010)
• "Dinosaurs, Runaway Volcanism, Change, and Evolution"
  (March 24, 2010)
• "Looks Like a Big Rock Killed the Dinosaurs"
  (March 7, 2010)
• "Asteroid Impact? Yes; Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm? Maybe Not"
  (December 31, 2009)
• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!
  (December 20, 2009)

More, in this blog:

• Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture "

More, elsewhere:

• "Shiva Structure: A Possible KT Boundary Impact Crater on the Western Shelf of India"
  Sankar Chatterjee, Necip Guven, Aaron Yoshinobu, and Richard Donofrio, Special Publications, Museum Texas Tech University (2002? 2006?) (pdf)

Long-Necked Dinosaurs: Heads Up!

"Long-Necked Dinosaurs Held Heads High"
LiveScience (June 1, 2010)

"The long necks of the largest dinosaurs that ever lived might have been raised high after all, a new study now suggests.

"The sauropod dinosaurs, which included titans such as Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus (once known as Brontosaurus), are well-known for the very long necks they usually sported. The lengthy neck extended the animal's reach for grabbing food.

"However, it has recently proven controversial as to whether sauropods actually ever held their heads up high to dine on hard-to-reach leaves because of all the energy needed to pump blood to such heights. Most researchers, for instance, do agree that Apatosaurus and Diplodocus likely kept their necks low while grazing.

"Now, at least for some of these sauropods, research suggests the goliaths did indeed hold their heads up high...."

For example, Euhelopus zdanskyi weighed in the neighborhood of 8,400 pounds and was about 36 to 39 feet long, nose-to-tail-tip. Bones let the University of Flensburg, Germany's functional morphologist Andreas Christian run numbers on what sort of stresses the neck and head would have experienced when the animal was alive.

Turns out, a giraffe-like posture with the neck held straight at about a 45 degree angle would not have been too hard to hold aloft. For a few minutes at least.

More number crunching showed that holding the neck up like that would pay off in added energy, if the dinosaur had moved just its neck around to get at high leaves, instead of shifting its entire body to get at food.

I doubt that this is the last word on the habits of long-necked dinosaurs: particularly since we currently lack any live specimens. Even if (when?) someone manages to reconstruct dinosaur DNA and coax it into growing a dinosaur for study, the animal's behavior will be debatable, since it can't be observed in its natural habitat, and - perhaps more to the point - wasn't raised in the wild.

Sort-of-related post:

• "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More"
  (June 29, 2009)

Utah Dinosaur Buried Alive? Bad News for Dino, Good News for Paleontologists

"New Dinosaur Might Have Been Buried Alive"
Discovery News (March 23, 2010)

"During the Early Jurassic Period, a sand dune collapsed at Utah's red rocks with such force that it might have buried alive a plant-eating dinosaur, entombing and preserving the dinosaur upside-down for 185 million years, according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.

"The buried remains represent Utah's oldest most complete dinosaur. It has been named Seitaad ruessi, with the first word referring to a Navajo creation legend sand-desert monster that swallowed individuals in the dunes. The second honors artist and explorer Everett Ruess, who mysteriously disappeared at age 20 in the same region during the 1930s.

"Ruess' body has never been found, but the fossils of the new dinosaur froze the animal's final moments. A CT scan reveals the dinosaur was missing a single toe and a lower leg bone, suggesting that it either died and was shortly thereafter engulfed by a collapsing sand dune, or was buried alive...."

It's a pretty big deal. This is the oldest (relatively) complete fossilized dinosaur found in Utah: and is an early model of the huge sauropods. Those are those thick-bodied, long-necked dinosaurs that, together with T-Rex, are what many folks may think of first when they hear "dinosaur."

Apart from the 'coolness factor,' a complete - or nearly-complete - fossilized anything is important to paleontologists. If nothing else, it lets them verify the accuracy of their educated guesses about which bones belong with which critters. Like the Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus mistake. And no, I don't think that proves evolution is a fraud, any more than I think that the lack of dinosaur bones stamped with "Made By God" prove that God doesn't exist. ("Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God," A Catholic Citizen in America (June 29, 2009))

And, this creature was one of the first sauropodomorphs from North America.

Dinosaurs, Runaway Volcanism, Change, and Evolution

"Dinosaurs Rode Volcanic Armageddon to Victory"
Wired Science (March 22, 2010)

"Geologists have turned a series of 200 million-year-old lake-bed sediments into an epic narrative of the dinosaurs' journey from ecological obscurity to Earthly supremacy, a mystery that has lingered even as their disappearance is explained.

"The dino path to dominance appears to have been cleared when the supercontinent Pangea cracked, setting off 600,000 years of volcanic activity that wiped out the dinosaurs' crocodilian competitors.

" 'This is the strongest case for a volcanic cause of a mass extinction event to date,' wrote geoscientists in a paper published March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"From 250 million to 200 million years ago, dinosaurs were just upstart lizards. The planet was dominated by a family of vaguely crocodile-like animals called crurotarsans that filled every major ecological niche, from slow-munching herbivores to fleet predators...."

"...From 250 million to 200 million years ago, dinosaurs were just upstart lizards. The planet was dominated by a family of vaguely crocodile-like animals called crurotarsans that filled every major ecological niche, from slow-munching herbivores to fleet predators.

"About halfway through that period, known as the Triassic, an asteroid struck Earth. Many of the planet's species went extinct, but the crurotarsans weathered the storm. Then, 25 million years after that, in what's known as the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, the crurotarsans and at least half of all other animal species vanished. Exactly why isn't known, but scientists now have a pretty good idea...."

Like I've said before, change happens.


(from Wired Science, used w/o permission)

Those aren't dinosaurs: they were crurotarsans, those "crocodilian competitors" critters that got wiped out about 200,000,000 years ago (closer to 199,600,000 - maybe - but who's counting?) Crocodile-like they are, but the first thing I thought, seeing the one on the left, was 'what's a picture of a pike doing in this article?'

You Thought You Had a Bad Day?

(from Wired Science, used w/o permission)
"CAMP" stands for Central Atlantic magmatic province, by the way. It's "a 3.5 million-square-mile lake of lava" that formed during the 600,000 or so years when the Atlantic was born.

That's a map of Earth, about 210,000,000 years ago, before about 600,000 years of volcanism in what's now the Atlantic Ocean apparently killed off a whole lot of creatures: including the crurotarsans. Bad news for them, good news for the dinosaurs. And, eventually, us.

Let's go over some of the (approximate) times mentioned in the article

• 225,000,000 years BP (before present)
  • Asteroid hits Earth
• 200,000,000 years BP
  • Heavy volcanic activity starts
  • Pangea breaks in two
    • We call that break "The Atlantic"
• 199,400,000 years BP
  • Heavy volcanic activity ends
    • Elapsed time: 600,000 years
    • Crurotarsans are extinct
      • Leaving room for dinosaurs
• 65,000,000 years BP
  • Asteroid hits Earth
    • Dinosaurs are extinct
    • Leaving room for mammals
      • And, eventually, humans

For the last dozen millennia or so, humanity's been living in a relatively tranquil warm spell during one of this planet's glacial periods. Or maybe at the end of the more recent period of continental glaciation. Last I heard, the jury's still out on that one.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that 15,000 or so years is a fairly short time on Earth's history. It isn't even close to being on the same order of magnitude as, say, 65,000,000, 200,000,000, or 225,000,000.

And, that life on Earth has been through asteroid hits, massive volcanic events, and a glacial epoch where continental glaciers reached all the way to the equator. (" 'Snowball Earth,' Evolution, and Really Old Rocks" (March 16, 2010)) The lava flow mentioned in this article covered around 3,500,000 square miles. That's very roughly 1.8% of Earth's surface. By comparison, the United States of America is a little bigger than that, but not by much.

Today's emphasis on how endangered the koala, panda, and Bee Creek Cave Harvestman spider is, I think, laudable in some ways. At least it's a change of pace from the 19th century silliness that apparently assumed that every natural resource was effectively infinite.

But although I think that Harvestman spiders in the Bee Creek Cave may be in danger of dying out, I'm not particularly worried about life on Earth as a whole. Mother nature is a tough old mother. More like Queen Boudicca than Clara Bow ("Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!" (December 20, 2009))

I'm not very worried about humanity, either. We've only been around for maybe 1,600,000 years - maybe longer - but that period included one of Earth's seven major glacial periods. We made it through that - quite possibly developing much of our early technology while dealing with the changing conditions. We're opportunistic omnivores, there are well upwards of 6,000,000,000 of us, and we have a history of bouncing back from catastrophes. Remember the Black Death?

I think we'll prove as hard to kill as rats - maybe even cockroaches. I'll grant that's not a flattering comparison: but I think the reputation those critters have is due in part to their being, as a group, nearly indestructible.

More:

• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture "

Looks Like a Big Rock Killed the Dinosaurs

"Rock Solid Link: Asteroid Doomed the Dinosaurs"
Space.com (March 4, 2010)

"Scientists have debated for two decades whether a giant space rock wiped out the dinosaurs or if some other catastrophe did the deed.

"Now, a blue-ribbon panel of scientists has banded together to support the link between the Chicxulub asteroid impact crater in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula with the mass extinction of dinosaurs and the majority of life on our planet 65 million years ago.

" 'It is an international consensus. They are saying that there's a rock solid link between the Chicxulub impact event and the K-T boundary mass extinction,' said David Kring, a Senior Staff Scientist and geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in nearby Houston...."

I'm not terribly surprised at the conclusion: Something that blew a hole a mile deep and 110 miles wide (Space.com (14 April 2008)) might reasonably be expected to throw a monkey wrench in the works. Sounds like 85% of the species around at the time died out. ("The End-Cretaceous (K-T) Extinction," Hooper Virtual Paleontological Musuem, Canada)

Not that the K-T event was the worst time for Earth's 'delicate' ecosystems. Now that mass extinction in the Permian: That was a big one.

Anyway: that Space.com article doesn't go into much detail, but it does give a sort of overview on what's happened, and what sort of thinking goes into decisions like the one that 'blue ribbon panel' made.

Related posts:

• "Big Snake, Small Dinosaur, and a Professor from Michigan"
  (March 2, 2010)
• "Asteroid Impact? Yes; Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm? Maybe Not"
  (December 31, 2009)
• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!"
  (December 20, 2009)

---

More in this blog:

• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"
  (Last updated December 21, 2009)

Big Snake, Small Dinosaur, and a Professor from Michigan

"In Fossil Find, 'Anaconda' Meets 'Jurassic Park' "
Christopher Joyce, NPR (March 2, 2010)

"Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.

"The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized...."


(Sculpture by Tyler Keillor/Photo by Ximena Erickson/Image modified by Bonnie Miljour, via NPR, used w/o permission)

That was about 67,000,000 years ago. Things have changed since then. Snakes have jaws that unhinge now (the ancient snake didn't), and in the last century Western scientists have gotten into the habit of asking permission before they cart something valuable out of another country. Which I think is an improvement.

Anyway: the University of Michigan's professor Jeffrey Wilson got permission from the Indian government to cart a briefcase-sized hunk of rock with these fossils in it back to the United States, where he spent a year releasing the bits and pieces of what had been buried since before the dinosaurs went the way of the trilobites.

Aside from giving the University of Michigan some headline-worthy publicity, this fossil and others found in the same general area will probably help paleontologists piece together a more complete picture, not just of the plants and animals living where India is now, but how the ecology of the place worked.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Asteroid Impact? Yes; Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm? Maybe Not"
  (December 31, 2009)
• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!"
  (December 20, 2009)
• "Ancient Galloping Crocodile"
  (November 19, 2009)
• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"
  (September 26, 2009)
• "Tiny T. Rex Fossil, China, Paleontology, and International Law"
  (September 18, 2009)
• "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More"
  (June 29, 2009)
• "It Seems it Took More Than an Asteroid Hit to Finish the Dinosaurs"
  (April 29, 2009)
• "Is it a Mystery, Why Dinosaurs are History?"
  (July 3, 2008)
• "The Sun as a Swinger? Cardiff U's Title is Better for Mass Extinction Article"
  (May 12, 2008)

Flightless Birds Flew: A Long Time Ago

"Ancient Birds Grew Fat and Lazy"
Discovery News (January 25, 2010)

"After the dinosaurs went extinct, the ancestors of some flightless birds didn't bother leaving the ground."

"The flighted ancestor of birds such as the Australian emu and cassowary became too heavy to fly after the extinction of dinosaurs made it safer to forage for food, suggests a new study.

"The finding by Australian National University (ANU) biologist Dr Matthew Phillips and colleagues at Massey University in New Zealand also answers the mystery of how flightless birds managed to disperse across oceans.

"Their work, published in the latest Systematic Biology journal, follows on from recent work that raised uncertainty about the "single ancestor" theory of the group of flightless birds, known as ratites.

"Phillips, of the ANU's Research School of Biology, says ratites are a group of flightless birds that include the Australian emu and cassowary, African ostrich, New Zealand's kiwi and now-extinct moa, rhea from South America and the extinct elephant birds of Madagascar...."

Scientists have figured that all of today's flightless birds came from a single ancestor, which lived long before the dinosaurs went extinct about 65,000,000 years ago. The idea was that they walked across the supercontinent that existed before the current round of continental drifting.

Good idea, plausible - except that the supercontinent broke up before that ancestral bird.

Now, it looks like the flightless birds weren't, until more recently. Probably around the dinosaurs went extinct, making room for big animals on the ground.

The Discovery News article discusses research - mostly using mitochondrial DNA.

Interesting - for me, anyway. I remember when paleontology was mostly a matter of digging fossilized bones out of rocks and piecing them together.

Not-entirely-unrelated post:

• "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More"
  (June 29, 2009)

Dino Art: Can You Dig It?

"Jurassic art"
Sandra Frykholm, Sequim Gazette (January 20, 2010)

"A 200-pound humerus rests on a custom-made workbench where Don Bradley is preparing it to be mounted on stainless steel arches over a foot-thick slab of giant sequoia.

" 'Whole bones are so hard to find, I decided not to section it into pieces,' Bradley said.

"A dinosaur enthusiast since childhood, Bradley has rekindled his interest as he nears retirement. His unique approach uses dinosaur fossils in artistic presentations suitable for public or private art collections.

" 'This stuff was found 50 years ago,' Bradley said. He acquired most of his fossils from an old-timer in the Southwest. ..."


(from Sequim Gazette, used w/o permission)

Bradley cuts and polishes some fossils, leaves some in their natural state.

Photos in the article and on Bradley's website show impressive - and attractive pieces of sculpture. I can see why someone would want to buy them.

What the article didn't say, was how he makes sure that he doesn't make something that's interesting to a paleontologist into a paperweight. Given his long interest in dinosaurs, I'm assuming that he's got a process for that.

Don Bradley's studio website, Paleo Lithic Art: dinosaur-gems.com.

Asteroid Impact? Yes; Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm? Maybe Not

"Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm Theory Questioned"
Space.com (December 28, 2009)

"New research challenges the idea that the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also sparked a global firestorm.

"Scientists modeled the effect that sand-sized droplets of liquefied rock from the impact had on atmospheric temperature. The asteroid is thought to have gouged out the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

"It was previously thought that the falling spherules, as the tiny rocks are called, heated up the atmosphere by several degrees for up to 20 minutes — hot enough and long enough to cause whole forests to spontaneously burst into flames.

"As evidence for this, scientists pointed to what appears to be carbon-rich soot from burned trees discovered in the thin band of debris dating back to the impact some 65 million years ago, a shift in geologic time called the K-T boundary...."

If the new mathematical model is a closer approximation to what actually happened, the first bits of molten sand slowed down as they fell through the atmosphere, forming an opaque cloud which insulated the surface from (some) of the heat.

It still was a really bad day, followed by quite a number of really bad years.

That soot came from somewhere, though: looks like something caught fire about the same time that the impact happened. One possibility mentioned in the article is petroleum. The area around the Chicxulub impact site is oil-rich today - so the K-T boundary may be evidence of a gargantuan oil field fire.

Related posts:

• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!"
  (December 20, 2009)
• "Laacher See Supervolcano Eruption: You Think You Had a Bad Day?!"
  (September 26, 2009)
• "It Seems it Took More Than an Asteroid Hit to Finish the Dinosaurs"
  (April 29, 2009)
• "Is it a Mystery, Why Dinosaurs are History?"
  (July 3, 2008)
• "The Sun as a Swinger? Cardiff U's Title is Better for Mass Extinction Article"
  (May 12, 2008)

---

More in this blog:

• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"
  (Last updated December 21, 2009)

Ancient Galloping Crocodile

---

Updated (December 2, 2009)
More:

• "Galloping, Dinosaur-Eating Crocodiles Found in the Sahara"
  DiscoveryNews (November 19, 2009)
• "5 "Oddball" Crocs Discovered, Including Dinosaur-Eater"
  National Geographic News (November 19, 2009)

---

"Fossil hunters unearth galloping, dinosaur-eating crocodiles in Sahara"
"The primitive crocodiles, which lived 100m years ago, were good swimmers but were also capable of galloping across the plains"
guardian.co.uk (November 19, 2009)

"Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of primitive crocodiles that "galloped" on land and patrolled the broad rivers that coursed through north Africa one hundred million years ago.

"The skeletons of five creatures that walked with dinosaurs – and ate them – were unearthed in remote and rocky regions of what are now Morocco and Niger during a series of expeditions in the Sahara desert.

"Three of the crocodiles are new species and include Kaprosuchus saharicus, a 6.5m-long beast with three sets of dagger-like tusks and an armoured snout for ramming its prey...."

Another crocodilian fossil was of a yard-long critter that - apparently - ate plants and maybe grubs. And, had buck teeth.

Then, there's this critter:


(From guardian.co.uk, used w/o permission)
"Artist's conception of one of the crocodiles, which had a soft, dog-like nose and was an agile galloper. Photograph: Todd Marshall/National Geographic"

A dog-like nose. That got me to thinking: maybe this should be called a dogodile? A crocodog?

And, yes: it's possible to make an educated guess from bones, and how similar creatures are put together, what sort of a nose a fossilized skeleton had. It's the same sort of reconstruction that forensic anthropologists do, when people come across a human skeleton - and are trying to figure out who it was.

The new fossils are a pretty big deal for paleontologists:

"...The most striking feature the beasts have in common was revealed by their bone structure, which suggests they were efficient swimmers, but when they clambered ashore they were also capable of galloping across the plains. Modern crocodiles crawl on their bellies because their legs sprawl out to the side....."

Crocodiles today are good swimmers, but not at their best on land: since their legs stick out to the side. The ability of these contemporaries of the dinosaurs to do well on land and in the water may help explain why they left descendants that look a bit like them, and the dinosaurs didn't.

I know: quite a few "dinosaurs" were at my hummingbird feeder this summer: but birds have something like 60,000,000 years' worth of adaptation for flight - and don't look much like the dinosaurs they seem to be descended from.

The Guardian article ends with a link to the National Geographic special coming up, "When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs," coming up this Saturday: November 21, 2009. Appropriately enough, since it was a National Geographic-sponsored expedition that found the fossils.

More-or-less-related posts:

• "Every Wondered About Trilobites? Have I Got a Micro-Review for You!"
  (November 12, 2009)
• "Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture"
  (September 26, 2009)
• "Tiny T. Rex Fossil, China, Paleontology, and International Law"
  (September 18, 2009)
• "Eyeless Crustacean: Here's Not Looking At You"
  (September 11, 2009)
• "Another Look at How Some Dinosaurs Grew So Large"
  (July 9, 2009)
• "Previously-Unknown Bacteria Species 120,000 Years Under Ice - and Alive"
  (June 15, 2009)
• "Life Could Have Survived Earth's Late Heavy Bombardment"
  (May 24, 2009)
  • Scared silly over climate change? 'Mother Earth' is a tough old bird
• "Early Humans: Climbing/Walking Tradeoff Pushed Back"
  (April 30, 2009)
• "It Seems it Took More Than an Asteroid Hit to Finish the Dinosaurs"
  (April 29, 2009)
• "Hurdia Victoria: Cambrian Supercritter of the Burgess Shale"
  (March 20, 2009)

Or, click "dinosaurs" or "paleontology" in the Label Cloud.

Since "everybody knows," in America, at least, that science and religion get along about as well as mongoose and cobra, and since some regular readers may have learned that I'm a Catholic (that's right - one of those people), this might be a good place to put links to this post:

• "Space Aliens, the News, and Those Catholics"
  (November 11, 2009)

And these, from another blog, A Catholic Citizen in America:

• "Astrobiology, the Vatican, and the Meaning of Our Existence"
  (November 12, 2009)
• "Copernicus, Galileo, Science and a Reality Check"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (October 26, 2009)
• "A Patron Saint of - Scientists?!"
  (October 25, 2009)
• "Really Old Dust Grains, a Galactic Collision, and a Lively Interest in God's Creation"
  (August 10, 2009)
• "Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God"
  (June 29, 2009)
• "Faith and Reason, Religion and Science"
  (March 20, 2009)
  Particularly
  • Darwin and Huxley vs. Ussher and Carlyle
  • What If Darwin Had Been an Astronomer?
• "Catholic Church, Creationism, Evolution, Facts and Faith"
  (March 5, 2009)

More about the new crocodilians:

• "3 new ancient crocodile species fossils found"
  The Associated Press (November 19, 2009)

Tiny T. Rex Fossil, China, Paleontology, and International Law

"Tiny T. rex fossil discovery startles scientists"
CNN (September 17, 2009)

"A pint-sized version of the Tyrannosaurus rex, with similarly powerful legs, razor-sharp teeth and tiny arms, roamed China some 125 million years ago, said scientists who remain startled by the discovery.

"The predator, nicknamed Raptorex, lived about 60 million years before the T. rex and was slightly larger than the human male, scientists said.

"The findings, to be released Friday in the journal Science, are based on fossilized remains discovered in lake beds in northeastern China. They show a dinosaur with many of the specialized physical features of Tyrannosaurus rex at a fraction of its size...."

The fossil is significant on a couple of points.

Surprising!

It's not often that paleontologists get surprised by a dinosaur fossil these days. 'Raptorex' did just that.

"...'The most interesting and important thing about this new fossil is that It is completely unexpected,' said Stephen Brusatte, co-author of the article, in a conference call with reporters...."

Data that confirms what's known or surmised is useful - Data that doesn't is where new discoveries come from.

Smuggled Bones

'Raptorex' was found in China. Then the bones were smuggled out, and eventually bought by a collector in Massachusetts. He turned them over to researchers.

The bad news is that the fossil was smuggled out of China.

The good news is that it didn't disappear into what's politely called a 'private collection' somewhere.

The better news is that the fossil will be returned to China.

I think western civilization is catching on that laws apply to everybody - or should. But that's a whole different topic.

More about fossils and China:

• "Ancient bones seized, returned to China"
  CNN (September 17, 2009)

Another Look at How Some Dinosaurs Grew So Large

"How Dinosaurs Got So Big"
LiveScience (July 6, 2009)

"The secret to mega-dinosaurs' impressive sizes may be that the reptiles used more of their energy for growing and less for keeping their bodies warm compared with some creatures.

"A new model could help explain how some dinosaurs, such as long-necked sauropods, could have achieved masses of around 60 tons — about eight times the mass of an African elephant, the largest land animal alive today.

"The two main factors that determine vertebrate size are the amount of available food and how the creature expends its energy, said researcher Brian K. McNab, a paleontologist at the University of Florida. For example, elephants can be quite large because they feed off grasses, a relatively abundant food supply as opposed to say, the nectar that hummingbirds and bees consume, McNab said...."

The LiveScience article seems to be a pretty good overview of McNab's speculations, and a review, at least, of what we know - and have surmised - about dinosaurs.

I'm not sure if LiveScience over-simplified NcNab's work, or if this really is a fair sample:

"...'I think it was impossible for [dinosaurs] to have really high metabolic rates like mammals and birds, simply because the resources weren't there,' he told LiveScience.

"For example, there were no grasses in the Mesozoic, which are a major food source for herbivores, McNab said...." (LiveScience)

True: grasses didn't exist when these enormous animals did. But without a detailed analysis of the biome those dinosaurs lived in - including data on the caloric and other nutritional values of the plants available - I'm not sure that no grass = no big animals idea is really valid.

But I'm no expert.

The point about larger animals shedding heat less rapidly than smaller ones has been made fairly often in discussions of dinosaur metabolism.

NcNab's speculations are another reason why I think researchers could learn a great deal, if it was possible to grow a living dinosaur. That's an idea that's getting less wildly improbable by the year: "Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More" (June 29, 2009).

Bringing Back the Dinosaurs: Not a Crazy Idea Any More

"Jurassic Park comes true: How scientists are bringing dinosaurs back to life with the help of the humble chicken"
MailOnline (June 13, 2009)

"Deep inside the dusty university store room, three scientists struggle to lift a huge fossilised bone.

"It is from the leg of a dinosaur.

"For many years, this chunky specimen has languished cryptically on a shelf.

Interesting but useless — a forgotten relic of a lost age.

"Now, with hammer and chisel poised, the academics from Montana State University in America gather round.

"They are about to shatter this rare vestige of the past.

"Why would they do such a thing?

"The answer is that they believe that this single fragment of a beast which stalked the earth untold millions of years ago could hold the key which will unlock the secrets of the dinosaurs...."

The first part of the article is long on drama and short on facts, and may have been intended to draw attention to a television documentary, "Dinosaurs: Return To Life." Something with the same title and subject aired on Discovery Channel - yesterday, I see.

Too bad. It might have been an entertaining - and possibly informative - way to spend an hour. I may catch a re-run, eventually.

Farther down the 'page,' the MailOnline article gets into what makes "Dinosaurs: Return to Life" more than one more docuflick about dinosaurs.

While airlifting a remarkably well-preserved and complete 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in Montana, a thigh bone was cracked open.

Still, two halves of a thighbone are better than none, so Montana State University professor of palaeontology Jack Horner, palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer and research assistant Jennifer Wittmeyer studied the thing. Schweitzer noticed an odd structure in a piece she'd been given to scrutinize.

Cutting a long story short, there was 68,000,000-year-old T-rex tissue in the bone.

It wasn't exactly fresh, but it was still gooey. The scientists think they may have spotted osteocytes in the mess: bone-growing cells.

The article discusses a number of other points, including mutant chickens at the University of Wisconsin.

My guess is that, between parts of dinosaur DNA that may be recovered from finds like the one in Montana, and what we're learning about the genetic code, it may not be all that long before someone grows a reasonable facsimile of a dinosaur.

Aside from being a subject for media sensationalism, and despite its being raised in what is profoundly not its natural habitat, there would be a great deal to be learned from a living, breathing dinosaur.

And, Jurassic Park notwithstanding, my guess is that the trick would be keeping the creature alive.

More, about studying dinosaurs, at "Trotting With Emus To Walk With Dinosaurs," Science Daily, (October 30, 2006).

It Seems it Took More Than an Asteroid Hit to Finish the Dinosaurs

"Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact"
LiveScience (April 28, 2009)

"The great splat of an asteroid that might have wiped out the dinosaurs apparently didn't get all of them. New fossil evidence suggests some dinosaurs survived for up to half a million years after the impact in remote parts of New Mexico and Colorado.

"The whole idea that a space rock destroyed the dinosaurs has become controversial in recent years. Many scientists now suspect other factors were involved, from increased volcanic activity to a changing climate. Either way, some 70 percent of life on Earth perished, and an asteroid impact almost surely played a role.

"Scientists recently analyzed dinosaur bones found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin. Based on detailed chemical investigations of the bones, and evidence for the age of the rocks in which they are found, the researchers think some dinosaurs outlived the crash that occurred 65 million years ago and stuck around for a while.

" 'This is a controversial conclusion, and many paleontologists will remain skeptical,' said David Polly, one of the editors of the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, in which the research was published today...."

I'm pretty sure we haven't heard the last word on what happened around 65 million years ago.

The scientists who found these oddly young bones checked out the possibility that the bones were old, had been exposed by erosion, and re-deposited in newer rocks.

That apparently didn't happen: The bones match the rocks they were found in - and a 'some assembly required' hadrosaur skeleton was found. 34 bones of it, anyway - and that many bones of an individual being found together would be unlikely if they were debris washed downstream by a river long ago.

This is a pretty good overview of another bit of evidence - one which suggests that the extinction event that finished the dinosaurs is more complex than we thought.

The Dinos are Coming! The Dinos are Coming!

"Walking With Dinosaurs LIVE! 2009"
The Creature Production Company

"After 65 million years they're back!

"After years of planning, the award-winning BBC TV series, Walking with Dinosaurs comes to life in a stunning theatrical event.

"Internationally renowned designers have worked with scientists to create 15 life-size dinosaurs, including the terror of the ancient terrain, Tyrannosaurus-rex! Be amazed and thrilled as the greatest creatures ever to walk the earth return before your eyes...."

The promotional website has an FAQ page, fact sheet page, a bit of how the show got started, how to buy tickets, and more of the usual: including a "Meet the Dinos page that isn't exactly usual.

You may have fun looking over the website: it's pretty good 'multi-media' stuff.

Tame T-Rex at the Museum - Sort of

"Real Live Dinosaur"
MySpaceTV Videos (August 8, 2008)

"They finally found a way to clone real Dinosaurs. Simply Amazing!

" *Thanks for the hundreds of emails sent in question of location. It's at the Natural History Museum, visit www . nhm . org"

A cloned dinosaur? Not really. But the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County put on quite a show, just the same.