Originally posted by JonLanceBarker

Bob Bakker, as in the paleontologist/Pentecostal preacher?

Yes. The flamboyant paleontologist with the wild beard and cowboy hat is not as well known for being a Pentecostal preacher as he is for various maverick theories concerning dinosaurs.

Originally posted by rogue06

Yes. The flamboyant paleontologist with the wild beard and cowboy hat is not as well known for being a Pentecostal preacher as he is for various maverick theories concerning dinosaurs.

Interesting that Bakker hasn’t suffered from what Ben Stein and his Expelled movie seems to claim is the fate of those in the scientific community who profess a belief in God. Even though Bakker is authoring a book called “Bones, Bibles, and Creation” and has made remarks like...

By Robert Bakker :
Scientists nearly all the time [...] have the assumption that all religion is silly superstition. That all religious belief is stuff you've got to cure yourself of, get rid of, if you're going to be a good scientist. Noooooooo.

And said in an interview with Laelaps Science Blog that he considers “the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists” to be be greatest enemy of science education in the United States. Bakker clarified that he was referring to “Richard Dawkins and his colleagues”, calling them “uber-Darwinists”. In his view, they “come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions.”

Sure is strange, if there really is some conspiracy to muzzle those who believe in God in the scientific community, that Bakker has escaped being “expelled.”

Ben Kear, a paleontologist with La Trobe University, and his colleague Neville Pledge of the South Australian Museum have identified a 25 myo ancestor of the modern kangaroo and found that they haven’t changed a lot over the years. The partial skeleton of the ancient kangaroo, named Ngamaroo archeri, was discovered in 1981 near the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia and includes leg bones and part of the jaw.

The fossilized remains indicate that it was about the size of a small dog, with limb bones that suggest it looked and moved much like a modern kangaroo does today. And considering the enormous amount of climate change in Australia over the last 25 million years, this suggests an astonishing resilience and flexibility of the creature in the face of continual environmental changes. The researchers indicate that the kangaroo’s success over so long a period of time can be attributed to the way that they get around.

“Hopping is one of the keys to why the modern kangaroo lineage has been such a success and their specialized limb proportions have just remained the same,” Dr Kear said. “Compared to how much other Australian mammal groups have changed in that time span, it shows that our hopping kangaroo really is a great survivor.” Kear described the kangaroo as having “a winning body plan.”

Kear and Pledge believe that the discovery of Ngamaroo (thought to date from the point where rat kangaroos and modern kangaroos diverge) will provide important insights into the history of kangaroo evolution. It was a plant eater that lived when the Australian landscape was much wetter and greener, feeding on soft vegetation rather than the tough grass that the modern kangaroo’s diet consists of.

This indicates that despite the similarities between Ngamaroo and its modern descendants, there were probably some marked differences. Today’s kangaroo has grinding teeth suitable for the tough grasses that it eats. It also digests its food in a way similar to modern horses. Ngamaroo’s diet probably consisted of softer and wetter leaves and similar foliage. So, much like how horses evolved from browsers to grazers, kangaroos similarly adapted.

The finding supports recent research conducted by Kear and others which had examined the kangaroo’s limb bone proportions through time and indicated that hopping has been around for much longer than had been originally thought. Previously most had held that the true kangaroo hop had evolved as a response to the aridification of Australia that had occurred approximately 10 mya. Now with the identification of Ngamaroo it can be shown that kangaroos have been hopping for at least 25 million years.

Ngamaroo had apparently lived alongside another more distant relative, the dog-like, omnivorous Nambaroo that had fangs and used a bounding gait, or galloped; the remains of which were discovered in northern Queensland. But as the continent started drying out around 10 mya, the non-hopping Nambaroo didn’t survive, whereas its hopping herbivore cousin did.



Further Reading:

Skippy a 25 million-year survivor

Ngamaroo - Skippy's 25-million-year-old ancestor

Skippy: A 25 million year old success

Today Antarctica is nearly completely covered in ice and snow but the discovery of several ancient burrows made by land-living tetrapod (four-legged vertebrates) animals dating back to the Triassic period, about 245 to 250 mya, have been discovered in Antarctica giving a peek at what life was like on the continent back then.

The first burrow was found in the Fremouw formation at Wahl Glacier in the Beardmore Glacier region, which is around 400 miles from the South Pole while nine smaller ones were discovered in the Lashly formation at the Allan Hills region in southern Victoria Land. I think that these sites, which are described as being near the outer edges of Antarctica, are in the Transantarctic Mountains, which extends 3500km (2175 miles) forming the boundary between East and West Antarctica and contains rocks that are 400 myo.

The largest burrow cast measures approximately 35cm (14”) long, 16cm (6”) wide and 9cm (3”) deep. They were preserved when fine sand carried by floodwaters, probably from an overflowing river, filled them and hardened into casts of the open spaces when the waters receded. No animal remains were found inside the burrows, suggesting that the burrow dweller probably escaped the deluge. Still, the hardened sediment in each burrow preserved a track made as the animals entered and exited, and apparently in some cases, claw marks scratched into the walls made during the initial excavation.

The fossil burrows predate bones of tetrapods found in the area by at least 15 million years. The burrows closely resemble ones excavated in South Africa and dating from the same time period. The similarity in size and structure, the tracks and marks as well as the fact that Antarctica and South African were connected as part of the supercontinent Pangea during the Triassic, led Dr. Christian Sidor, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology the university’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, to speculate they were created by similar creatures.

One of the South African burrows contained the complete fossilized skeleton of an extinct cat-sized badger-like reptile related to mammals known as Thrinaxodon. The larger Antarctica burrow “was probably made by the same type of animal,” remarked Sidor. The other smaller burrows resemble those made by mole-sized lizard-like reptiles called Procolophonids, but it is possible that they were made by the juveniles of larger creatures. While the bones of both of these creatures have been found in Antarctica, the team readily acknowledges that until someone locates the remains of an animal in a burrow, nobody can be certain about which creatures dug them out.

Finally, these burrows reveal that life in Antarctica was considerably different 250 mya than what we see now. Today, there aren’t any land-based creatures with vertebrates inhabiting Antarctica – the penguins and seals are dependent on the sea to survive. But at the time of the burrowers the area was relatively ice free, so they are valuable contributions to the record of life that existed on Antarctica before the ice.

Co-author and geosciences professor John Isbell of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee pointed out that 200 to 250 mya Antarctica was a very different place and “as far as we can tell the poles remained ice free.” That is not to say that the winter months were temperate in that temperatures would still have been quite cold, since both areas where the burrows were found are within the Antarctic Circle and would have experienced one or more days a year of complete darkness.

“The burrows were probably important shelters for these animals,” Sidor said. “There are lots of good reasons for burrowing at high latitudes, not the least of which is protection from the elements.” Especially when those high altitudes are near the poles. “Temperatures within a burrow remain much more constant than outside," said another of the paper’s co-authors, Molly Miller of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. So the dark of polar midwinter would have been a perfect time to settle in the burrow for a long nap.This indicates that it is possible the burrow-makers even hibernated.



Further Reading:

Pre-dinosaur era burrow discovered in Antarctica

Animal Burrows in Antarctic Tell of a Much Warmer Past

New Fossils Suggest Ancient Cat-sized Reptiles in Antarctica

245 Million-year-old Burrows of Land Vertebrates found in Antarctica

I think you may have meant "vertebraes" at one point where you typed "vertebrates"...

Today, there aren’t any land-based creatures with vertebrates inhabiting Antarctica

But that's a quibble alongside the great shout-out for the Burke, "my" local museum of natural history and ethnology:

Dr. Christian Sidor, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology the university’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture,

The Tibetan Plateau is a cold and treeless region about four times the size of France with an average altitude of over 4500 meters (14,760’) that has earned it the nickname of “the roof of the world.” So imagine the surprise that Dr. Yang Wang, an Associate Professor at the Department of Geological Sciences at Florida State University and researcher at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and his team felt when he found the remains of an ancient lake full of plant, animal and fish fossils that are normally found at significantly lower elevations than the 15,000’ they discovered them at.

Paleomagnetic dating was able to put these fossils at between 2 to 3 myo, while analysis of isotopes contained in the fossils determined that drastic climate change was the probable reason for their extermination.

These pieces of data have led Wang to conclude that major tectonic activity as recently as 2 to 3 mya pushed the plateau to its current elevation, making the region hostile to the various plants and animals that had flourished there before in the warmer, wetter climate. Previously, geologists held that the tectonic forces responsible took considerably more time than what Yang’s findings indicate, including recent research dating the plateau at approximately 13.5 myo.

This new evidence obviously raises questions concerning the validity of the methods usually employed by geologists to reconstruct the earlier elevations of the region. Yang noted that, “The uplift chronology of the Tibetan Plateau and its climatic and biotic consequences have been a matter of much debate and speculation because most of Tibet's spectacular mountains, gorges and glaciers remain barely touched by man and geologically unexplored.”

Yang added that, “Establishing an accurate history of tectonic and associated elevation changes in the region is important because uplift of the Tibetan Plateau has been suggested as a major driving mechanism of global climate change over the past 50-60 million years. What's more, the region also is thought to be important in driving the modern Asian monsoons, which control the environmental conditions over much of Asia, the most densely populated region on Earth.”

The team, which includes paleontologists from the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California, and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, plans on returning to the area this summer to continue their research in an attempt to answer some of the questions that have been raised by their research.

“Many of the places we've visited in Tibet are now deserts, and yet we found those thick deposits of lake sediments with abundant fossil fish and shells,” Yang said. “This begs the question: What came first and caused the disappearance of those lakes? Global climate change? Or, tectonic change?”

ETA: Hopefully they'll also do more research into how long it took to push the Tibetan Plateau up to its present elevation since it seems that not all areas of the Tibetan Plateau rose at the same time



Further Reading:

Fossils found in Tibet by FSU geologist revise history of elevation, climate

To late to edit the above post but I should note that when I mentioned Yang Wang and "his team" I was mistaken. It should have been "her team." My apologies to Dr. Wang

New analysis of preserved hair from the extinct Siberian woolly mammoth has confirmed that the species once consisted of two distinct groups rather than being a single species as had been assumed. Further, it appears that one of these groups went extinct some 45,000 years ago. That’s approximately 30,000 years before the other group and well before evidence of human habitation in the region.

A team of international researchers co-led by Stephen C. Schuster, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State University, compared mitochondrial genome sequences from 18 different mammoths and found that the mammoth groups diverged over a mya. The team is now trying to determine why the groups seem to have co-existed in the same region but went extinct at two different times in that the genomes reveal no functional differences between these two groups.

One possible explanation may have something to do with indications that the group which went extinct first appear to have had a more limited geographic range in comparison with the other longer surviving group. The former seems to have been restricted to northern Siberia whereas the latter group wandered from Europe, across Siberia, all the way into North America – a range nearly six times greater. The larger range of the second group may also have translated into larger overall populations which could also be a part of why they survived longer.

The team also discovered that despite being two distinct groups, the mammoths were very closely related to each other, which is surprising considering the wide geographic range. “The low genetic divergence of mammoth, which we discovered, may have degraded the biological fitness of these animals in a time of changing environments and other challenges,” noted the team’s other co-leader, Web Miller, who is also from Penn State.

This new study also demonstrates that the diversity of the two woolly mammoth groups was as low then as it is today in the dreadfully small populations of Asian elephants now living in southern India. “The low genetic divergence of the elephants in southern Indian has been suggested as contributing to the problems of maintaining this group as a thriving population,” Schuster said. Interestingly, the mitochondrial genomes discovered by the team are considerably more complete than those known for the modern Indian and African Elephants combined.

Still, regardless of the cause, at least in the case of the group that died out 45,000 years ago, it appears that humans could not have been a factor being that these mammoths went extinct before humans had even arrived in the area where the mammoths lived. This is important since many paleontologists have contended that the mammoths, as well as other large megafauna of the late Pleistocene, went extinct, in part, because of hunting pressure from humans. As Schuster puts it: “This discovery is particularly interesting because it rules out human hunting as a contributing factor, leaving climate change and disease as the most probable causes of extinction.”

The researchers point out that they can only speculate until further testing is done and that they need nuclear DNA to do it. Nuclear DNA contains nearly a hundred thousand times more information than mitochondrial DNA does. Unfortunately nuclear DNA is also harder to obtain and accurately sequence from extinct species.

All in all, my favorite explanation for the extinction of mammoths and other mega-fauna still is that the trees are responsible



Further Reading:

Woolly Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory

A MAMMOTH DIVIDE

WOOLLY MAMMOTHS MAY HAVE FORMED TWO DISTINCT GROUPS

Hair Holds Key to Woolly Mammoth History

Woolly mammoth study changes theory

Originally posted by rogue06

New analysis of preserved hair from the extinct Siberian woolly mammoth has confirmed that the species once consisted of two distinct groups rather than being a single species as had been assumed. Further, it appears that one of these groups went extinct some 45,000 years ago. That’s approximately 30,000 years before the other group and well before evidence of human habitation in the region.

A team of international researchers co-led by Stephen C. Schuster, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State University, compared mitochondrial genome sequences from 18 different mammoths and found that the mammoth groups diverged over a mya. The team is now trying to determine why the groups seem to have co-existed in the same region but went extinct at two different times in that the genomes reveal no functional differences between these two groups.

One possible explanation may have something to do with indications that the group which went extinct first appear to have had a more limited geographic range in comparison with the other longer surviving group. The former seems to have been restricted to northern Siberia whereas the latter group wandered from Europe, across Siberia, all the way into North America – a range nearly six times greater. The larger range of the second group may also have translated into larger overall populations which could also be a part of why they survived longer.

The team also discovered that despite being two distinct groups, the mammoths were very closely related to each other, which is surprising considering the wide geographic range. “The low genetic divergence of mammoth, which we discovered, may have degraded the biological fitness of these animals in a time of changing environments and other challenges,” noted the team’s other co-leader, Web Miller, who is also from Penn State.

This new study also demonstrates that the diversity of the two woolly mammoth groups was as low then as it is today in the dreadfully small populations of Asian elephants now living in southern India. “The low genetic divergence of the elephants in southern Indian has been suggested as contributing to the problems of maintaining this group as a thriving population,” Schuster said. Interestingly, the mitochondrial genomes discovered by the team are considerably more complete than those known for the modern Indian and African Elephants combined.

Still, regardless of the cause, at least in the case of the group that died out 45,000 years ago, it appears that humans could not have been a factor being that these mammoths went extinct before humans had even arrived in the area where the mammoths lived. This is important since many paleontologists have contended that the mammoths, as well as other large megafauna of the late Pleistocene, went extinct, in part, because of hunting pressure from humans. As Schuster puts it: “This discovery is particularly interesting because it rules out human hunting as a contributing factor, leaving climate change and disease as the most probable causes of extinction.”

The researchers point out that they can only speculate until further testing is done and that they need nuclear DNA to do it. Nuclear DNA contains nearly a hundred thousand times more information than mitochondrial DNA does. Unfortunately nuclear DNA is also harder to obtain and accurately sequence from extinct species.

All in all, my favorite explanation for the extinction of mammoths and other mega-fauna still is that the trees are responsible



Further Reading:

Woolly Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory

A MAMMOTH DIVIDE

WOOLLY MAMMOTHS MAY HAVE FORMED TWO DISTINCT GROUPS

Hair Holds Key to Woolly Mammoth History

Woolly mammoth study changes theory

Here is the actual paper thanks to SteveF

The fossilized partial skeleton of a dinosaur consisting of seven bones roughly estimated at 70 myo, and unearthed in the Sustut Basin region of northern British Columbia back in 1971, appears to have belonged to a previously unknown species of dinosaur.

The remains consisting of bones from the dinosaur’s shin, arm and skull were discovered in a dip between mountains in the Skeena range near the confluence of Birdflat Creek and the Sustut River, northeast of Terrace by geologist Kenny Larsen while he was prospecting for the radioactive element thorium 37 years ago and hadn’t been analyzed until they were donated to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2004 and in 2006 were moved to the Royal British Columbia Museum. Victoria Arbour, an undergraduate student at the time at the University of Alberta, then began studying the fossils while working on her master’s degree.

Based on the sizes and shapes of the bones, it appears that they could have belonged to a smallish two-legged, herbivorous dinosaur. Some of the bones recovered resemble those associated with pachycephalosaurs whereas others are similar to ornithopods.

“There are similarities with two other kinds of dinosaurs, although there's also an arm bone we've never seen before. The Sustut dinosaur may be a new species, but we won't know for sure until more fossils can be found,” said Arbour, adding that, “It's very distinct from other dinosaurs that were found at the same time in southern Alberta.”

Yet, displaying a bit of professional caution, Arbour also noted that, “The Sustut dinosaur may be a new species, but we won't know for sure until more fossils can be found,” for it is possible that the bone fragments are from more than one individual, or even more than one type of dinosaur.

Analysis of the bones has been made difficult because the precise location where they were found is no longer known because Larsen’s original field notes have been lost. This of course makes them a bit tricky to date. But based upon properties of the rock attached to some of the fragments, Arbour and her colleagues think the dinosaur probably dates to approximately 70 mya in the Upper Cretaceous Period.

The specimen is referred to as the Sustut dinosaur though the researchers have tentatively named it Cerapoda incertae sedis, “pending the discovery of additional diagnostic material.”



Further Reading:

Mysterious Mountain Dinosaur May Be New Species

Old bones could be new dinosaur species

Researchers uncover mystery in oldest B.C. dinosaur bones

New Canadian Dinosaur Largely Mysterious

The upper arm bone of a 110 myo two-legged, carnivorous dinosaur discovered at Dinosaur Cove near Cape Otway in southeastern Victoria in 1989 appears to share several unique features with another carnivorous dinosaur from the central and southern part of the Patagonia region in Argentina known as Megaraptor namunhuaiquii, possibly providing the first evidence that dinosaurs were wandering across the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

Prior to this discovery most authorities thought the dinosaurs of what is now Australia were isolated from those in other sections of Gondwana due to either geographic or climatic barriers, including South America and Antarctica. Due to the rareness and fragmentary nature of the dinosaur bones thus far unearthed in Australia the origin of dinosaurs on the continent have been mysterious. Before this find their closest relatives seemed to be from the Northern Hemisphere, specifically from Eurasia and North America – land masses that were far from Australia at the time. This led many palaeontologists to conclude that Australia’s dinosaurs probably descended from northern hemisphere ancestors and evolved in isolation.

Megaraptor’s distinctively large clawed “hands” means the dinosaur had very distinctive forearms. All six paleontologists on the team led by Nate Smith of Chicago’s Field Museum independently noticed a close resemblance between the bone found in Australia and those associated with the Argentina based Megaraptor leading them to suspect a connection.

The length of the fossil bone, 19.3cm (7.6”), suggests the Australian dinosaur was about half the size of Megaraptor (approximately the size of a modern emu), although this could easily be due to it being a juvenile and thus smaller. It could also be due to the fact that the new find is at least 15 million years older than those found in Argentina and Megaraptors could have evolved into smaller creatures due to environmental differences or other factors.

But not everyone is so sure. Patricia Vickers-Rich, a paleontologist at Victoria Australia’s Monash University, whose team discovered the fossil in question, thinks that Smith’s team “is pushing the envelope,” because “too much is being interpreted based on a single bone.” She notes that the arm bone from Australia was “damaged and the conclusions being drawn from it are beyond what we feel are justified,” adding that, “More, and less fragmentary, material is needed before assertions such as are made in this paper can be taken scientifically seriously.”

Tom Rich, husband of Dr. Vickers-Rich, and also part of the team that found the bone as well as curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museum Victoria, echoed his wife's comments, adding that “fossils should not be identified on the basis of geography if one is going to do meaningful paleobiogeographic reconstructions—otherwise one will be going around in a very tight logical circle.”

Steve Salisbury from the University of Queensland’s School of Integrative Biology in Brisbane, and part of Smith’s team, agrees that working with a forearm bone alone is problematic, but he is confident that the Australian dinosaur is related to Megaraptor, if only through a common ancestor that wandered across Gondwana. Pointing to the unusually large elbow on the fossilized ulna he notes that they evaluated it against all comparable fossils found from around the world that they could and that, “No other dinosaurs have got a forearm that looks like Megaraptor's so when we find a forearm bone in Australia that matches Megaraptor the simplest explanation is that it is Megaraptor.”

If Smith’s team is correct in their analysis then this discovery could very well partially redraw the world map during the dinosaur era since if dinosaurs could travel across Gondwana during the Cretaceous period then this indicates that the supercontinent’s southern landmass probably broke up later than traditionally thought. Smith contends that if they had been separated evolutionary pressures would have pushed the dinosaurs in different directions as they adapted to their changing environments. His team hypothesizes that land bridges must have persisted between southern South America and the Western Antarctic Archipelago "until at least the Late Eocene," a period that began some 40 million years ago. Personally, I’m not so sure that the land masses had to remain attached somehow long after the dinosaurs went extinct and would appreciate clarification on this point given that, as Dr. Salisbury pointed out, this could also have implications for the origin of Australian mammals.



Further Reading:

Australian Dinosaur Found To Have South American Heritage

'Megaraptor' bone links Australia to ancient neighbours

New Dinosaur May Link S. American, Aussie Dinos

Aussie dinosaur bone takes bite out of theory of continental drift

Dinosaurs 'roamed freely' across Gondwana

Arm bone connects Aussie dinosaur to Argentina

Time to grab a bit of glory for Scotland. The fossilised remains of an armour-plated fish, actinolepis, has been uncovered in a Caithness quarry renowned for its fossil finds (Daily Express, UK, printed edition). This is the first of its kind to be found anywhere in the UK, the only example having been excavated in rock beds in Estonia. Apparently this beastie swam in a giant prehistoric lake when Scotland lay between twenty and thirty degrees south of the equator (anyone who lives in Scotland will know how amazing this sounds!).

This latest find was officially unveiled by Professor Nigel Trewin of Aberdeen University and coincides with the opening of a visitor shelter which houses and exhibition and a geological timeline.

Still on the subject of fossils in Scotland, we had a wee anniversary recently to mark the discovery by a Scottish lady and her brother (100 years or so ago) of the first complete icthyosaurus fossil. Having found it whilst walking on the beach, the dear lady thought she'd stumbled across "a weird crocodile". At least she didn't think it was the Loch Ness Monster.

Originally posted by MooseOnTheLoose

Time to grab a bit of glory for Scotland. The fossilised remains of an armour-plated fish, actinolepis, has been uncovered in a Caithness quarry renowned for its fossil finds (Daily Express, UK, printed edition). This is the first of its kind to be found anywhere in the UK, the only example having been excavated in rock beds in Estonia. Apparently this beastie swam in a giant prehistoric lake when Scotland lay between twenty and thirty degrees south of the equator (anyone who lives in Scotland will know how amazing this sounds!).

This latest find was officially unveiled by Professor Nigel Trewin of Aberdeen University and coincides with the opening of a visitor shelter which houses and exhibition and a geological timeline.

Still on the subject of fossils in Scotland, we had a wee anniversary recently to mark the discovery by a Scottish lady and her brother (100 years or so ago) of the first complete icthyosaurus fossil. Having found it whilst walking on the beach, the dear lady thought she'd stumbled across "a weird crocodile". At least she didn't think it was the Loch Ness Monster.

Do you have a source or preferably a link?

Originally posted by rogue06

Do you have a source or preferably a link?

Sorry. Just re-read your post and noticed that you already provided the source. My bad.

It appears that a new Jurassic period dinosaur bone bed has been discovered in Utah, already home of the world famous Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry and Dinosaur National Monument. This latest discovery was made outside the small town of Hanksville, which is about 200 miles southeast of Salt Lake City in the southeastern part of the state and is being worked by a team from the Burpee Museum of Natural History outside of Chicago, Illinois.

The location, now referred to as the Burpee-Hanksville site (estimated at being 148 myo and part of the Morrison Formation), has been known as a source of fossils to locals and Bureau of Land Management officials for years, though nobody apparently had any idea just how rich in fossil material it was. In just three weeks of excavating what was once a sandbar by a preserved river channel the team has found the fossilized bones from four different types of sauropods (Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus and Diplodocus), two different carnivorous theropods (Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus) and possibly even a Stegosaurus.

“Wherever you sit you find bones,” Scott Williams, Burpee’s manager of exhibits, said. “You always need a little bit of luck out here, but 30 minutes into working, we were finding bones and we didn’t have to dig very far at all.” Some of the bones are articulated, or preserved as complete pieces, but most are scattered. And while all the species unearthed so far are well studied ones, further excavation could still uncover one that hasn’t been seen before.

Matt Bonnan, an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Western Illinois University (who was picked by the Burpee Museum to work at the dig for his expertise in sauropods) noted that even though the fossils found thus far are from familiar species of dinosaurs, the team “will be able to take a look at old bones with new eyes and new techniques.” Their hope is to gain a better understanding of the ancient ecosystem based on the new discoveries thus expanding our understanding of the Late Jurassic period.

Furthermore, until now the only complete Brachiosaurus specimens have been recovered in Africa, so the Hanksville specimen could also impart a rare chance to evaluate how the same dinosaur evolved on different continents.

What’s more, nearby is a petrified forest with petrified conifer tree trunks up to 6’ in diameter and 30’ long that are so well preserved that you can still feel their bark and even read their annual growth rings. Fossilized freshwater clams, animal burrows and even some mammal bones have also been discovered.

This new site easily has the potential of matching the other Utah quarries in importance considering how many different species that have already been unearthed, but only time and more digging will tell.



Further Reading:

Major dinosaur fossil find in southern Utah

Utah announces 'major' dinosaur find by Illinois scientists

"Amazing" Dinosaur Trove Discovered in Utah

Team discovers dinosaur fossils near Hanksville

Dig team finding ‘level on level’ of dino bones

The recent discovery of a tiny abalone fossil in Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains just to the east of Malibu, California has provided more evidence that the mollusk, or more specifically, a marine snail, probably originated in southern California.

The discovery measures less than a quarter of an inch across, making it but a fraction of the size of the abalones found in the vicinity today. It has been dated at 78 myo, which is approximately 6 million years older than the previous record holder that was found in San Diego County, also in southern California.

Abalones are herbivores whose diet consists principally of kelp are probably known primarily for the iridescent mother-of-pearl that lines the inside of many species, though several varieties are also desired as food being considered a delicacy in many parts of the world.



Further Reading:

Beloved abalone might have originated in Southern California