Dinosaurs Left Europe??

Researchers have used network theory to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era -- including a curious exodus from Europe.

According to a research published in the Journal of Biogeography, dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the supercontinent Pangaea split into land masses that are separated by oceans.

In the study, the researchers used the Paleobiology Database that contains every documented and accessible dinosaur fossil from around the world. Fossil records for the same dinosaur families from different continents were then cross-mapped for different periods of time, revealing connections that show how they have migrated.

Some regions of the world, such as Europe, have extensive fossil records from a long history of palaeontology digs, while other parts of the world have been largely unexplored. To help account for this disparity in fossil records, which could otherwise skew the finding, the researchers applied a fliter to the database records to only count the first time that a dinosaur family connection occurred between two continents. The findings support the idea that, although continental splitting undoubtedly reduced intercontinental migration of dinosaurs, it did not completely inhibit it.

Suprisingly, the research also showed that all connections between Europe and other continents durinf the Early Cretaceous (125 - 100 million) were out-going. That is while dinosaurs families were leaving Europe, no new families  were migrated  into Europe.

While Network theory is commonly used in computer science for quantifying internet data, such as friend connection in the social media. It has only recently been applied to biology research and this is the first study it to on dinosaurs research.

Scientists Explain the Evolution of Large Dinosaur

Scientists have developed computer models of the bodies of sauropod dinosaurs to examine the evolution of their body shape. Scientists of the University of Liverpool have developed computer models of the bodies of sauropod dinosaurs to examine the evolution of their body shape.

Sauropod dinosaurs include the largest land animals to have ever lived. Some of the more well-known sauropods include Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus. They are renowned for their extremely long necks, long tails as well as four thick, pillar-like legs and small heads in relation to their body.

To date, however, there have been only limited attempts to examine how this unique body-plan evolved and how it might be related to their gigantic body size. Dr. Karl Bates from Department of Musculoskeletal Biology and his colleagues used three-dimensional computer models reconstructing the bodies of sauropod dinosaurs to analyze how their size, shape and weight-distribution evolved over time.

Source: Science Daily

Newly Discovered Dinosaur Reveals How T.Rex Became King of the Cretaceous

The fossilized remains of a new horse-sized dinosaur reveal how Tyrannosaurus Rex and its close relatives became top predators, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Paleontologists have long known from the fossil record that the family of dinosaurs at the center of the study - tyrannosaurs - transitioned from small bodied species to fearsome giants like the T. rex over the course of 70 million years. But now newly discovered dinosaur fossils suggest that much of this transition and growth in size occurred suddenly, toward the end of this 70 million year period. The study also shows that before the evolution of their massive size, tyrannosaurs had developed keen senses and cognitive abilities, including the ability to hear low-frequency sounds. This positioned them to take advantage of opportunities to reach the top of their food chain in the Late Cretaceous Period after other groups of large meat-eating dinosaurs had gone extinct about 80 -90 million years ago.

Until now, little was known about how tyrannosaurs became the giant, intelligent predator that dominated the landscape about 70 to 80 million years ago. The newly discovered species, named Timurlengia euotica, lived about 90 million years ago and fills a 20 million year gap in the fossil record of tyrannosaurs. The new species is a tyrannosaur but not the ancestor of the T.rex. 

The species' skull was much smaller than  smaller than that of T.rex. However, key features of Timurlengia's skull reveal that its brian and senses were already highly developed. Timurlengia was about the size of a horse and could weigh uo to 600 pounds. It had long legs and was likely a fast runner. 

The first tyrannosaurs lived during the Jurassic Period, around 170 million yeras ago, and were only slightly larger than a human. However, by the Late Cretaceous Period - around 100 million years later -tyrannosaurs had evolved into animals like T. rex which could weigh up to 7 tons.

The new species' small size some 80 million  years after tyrannosaurs first appeared in the fossil record indicates that its huge size developed only toward the end of the group's long evolutionary history.

The new study was funded by the European Commision The fieldwork was supported by the Natioanal Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. The work was carried out in collaboration with researcheers at the University of Edinburgh, Russian Academy of Sciences and Saint Petersburg State University.

Ancestral Malarial Organisms Traced to age of Dinosaurs

A new analysis of the prehistoric origin of malaria suggests that it evolved in insects at least 100 million years ago and the first vertebrate hosts of this disease were probably reptiles which at that time would have included the dinosaurs. The study also suggests that they  may have been involved in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Source: American Entomologist

250-Million-years old New Reptile Species Found in Brazil

A new reptile species that lived about 250 million years ago in the state of Rio Grande Do Sul, southernmost  Brazil has been discovered by an international team of researchers.

The species has been identified from a most complete and well preserved fossils skull.

The team named the reptile Teyujagua paradoxa

After KT extinction Age of Modern Fishes rises

According to two paleontologist, working in the National Academy of Science have determined that the world's most numerous and diverse vertebrate - ray finned fishes - began their ecological dominance of the oceans 66 million years ago, aided by the KT mass extinction event that killed of the Dinosaurs.

An assortment of Early Cenozoic ichthyoliths.

New Dinosaur found from Triassic-Jurassic Period

A new herbivorous dinosaur species, Sefapanosaurus zastronensis, has been found in the the Elliot formation of South Africa.

This report published on 23rd June 2015, in the zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

This Dinosaur is a herbivore form the southern regions of Gondwanaland some 200 million years ago in the late Triassic or Early Jurassic.  

New species of horned dinosaur with 'bizarre' features revealed

About 10 years ago, someone stumbled across some bones sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River in southeastern Alberta, Canada. Now, scientists describe that those bones belonged to a nearly intact skull of a very unusual horned dinosaur -- a close relative of the familiar Triceratops that had been unknown to science until now. 

"The specimen comes from a geographic region of Alberta where we have not found horned dinosaurs before, so from the onset we knew it was important," says Dr. Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada. "However, it was not until the specimen was being slowly prepared from the rocks in the laboratory that the full anatomy was uncovered, and the bizarre suite of characters revealed. Once it was prepared it was obviously a new species, and an unexpected one at that. Many horned-dinosaur researchers who visited the museum did a double take when they first saw it in the laboratory."
Brown likes to say, only partly in jest, that the uniqueness of this specimen was so obvious that you could tell it was a new species from 100 meters away.
What made this new horned dinosaur distinctive was the size and shape of its facial horns and the shield-like frill at the back of the skull. This new species is similar in many respects to Triceratops, except that its nose horn is taller and the two horns over its eyes are "almost comically small." But the new dinosaur's most distinctive feature is that frill, including what Brown describes as a halo of large, pentagonal plates radiating outward, as well as a central spike. "The combined result looks like a crown," he says.
Brown and study co-author Donald Henderson named the new dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a reference to its crown-like frill and to the man who first found and reported it to the museum. Despite the formal name, the scientists say they've taken to calling this dinosaur by the nickname "Hellboy."
While this new dinosaur is intriguing in its own right, Brown and Henderson say what's most significant are the implications for the evolution of dinosaurs' horned ornamentation. It's long been known that horned dinosaurs fall into one of two groups: the Chasmosaurines, with a small horn over the nose, larger horns over the eyes, and a long frill, and the Centrosaurines, characterized by a large horn over the nose, small horns over the eyes, and a short frill.
"This new species is a Chasmosaurine, but it has ornamentation more similar to Centrosaurines," Brown says. "It also comes from a time period following the extinction of the Centrosaurines."
Taken together, he says, that makes this the first example of evolutionary convergence in horned dinosaurs, meaning that these two groups independently evolved similar features.
The researchers say they hope to uncover more Regaliceratops peterhewsi specimens. They'll also be working on digital reconstructions of the skull, noting that, though intact, the fossil has been deformed after 70 million years in the Rocky Mountain foothills.
"This discovery also suggests that there are likely more horned dinosaurs out there that we just have not found yet, so we will also be looking for other new species," Brown says.

This story is taken from Science Daily

Did dinosaur-killing asteroid trigger largest lava flows on Earth?

The theory that an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is well accepted, but one puzzle is why another global catastrophe -- the huge, million-year eruption of the Deccan Traps flood basalts in India -- occurred at the same time. Geologists now argue this is not a coincidence. The impact probably rang Earth like a bell, reigniting an underground magma plume and generating the largest lava flows on Earth. 

Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India known as the Deccan Traps, explaining the "uncomfortably close" coincidence between the Deccan Traps eruptions and the impact, which has always cast doubt on the theory that the asteroid was the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

"If you try to explain why the largest impact we know of in the last billion years happened within 100,000 years of these massive lava flows at Deccan ... the chances of that occurring at random are minuscule," said team leader Mark Richards, UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. "It's not a very credible coincidence."

Richards and his colleagues marshal evidence for their theory that the impact reignited the Deccan flood lavas in a paper to be published in The Geological Society of America Bulletin, available online today (April 30) in advance of publication.

While the Deccan lava flows, which started before the impact but erupted for several hundred thousand years after re-ignition, probably spewed immense amounts of carbon dioxide and other noxious, climate-modifying gases into the atmosphere, it's still unclear if this contributed to the demise of most of life on Earth at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, Richards said.

"This connection between the impact and the Deccan lava flows is a great story and might even be true, but it doesn't yet take us closer to understanding what actually killed the dinosaurs and the 'forams,'" he said, referring to tiny sea creatures called foraminifera, many of which disappeared from the fossil record virtually overnight at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, called the KT boundary. The disappearance of the landscape-dominating dinosaurs is widely credited with ushering in the age of mammals, eventually including humans.

He stresses that his proposal differs from an earlier hypothesis that the energy of the impact was focused around Earth to a spot directly opposite, or antipodal, to the impact, triggering the eruption of the Deccan Traps. The "antipodal focusing" theory died when the impact crater, called Chicxulub, was found off the Yucatán coast of Mexico, which is about 5,000 kilometers from the antipode of the Deccan traps.

Flood basalts

Richards proposed in 1989 that plumes of hot rock, called "plume heads," rise through Earth's mantle every 20-30 million years and generate huge lava flows, called flood basalts, like the Deccan Traps. It struck him as more than coincidence that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life occurred at the same time as one of these massive eruptions.

"Paul Renne's group at Berkeley showed years ago that the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province is associated with the mass extinction at the Triassic/Jurassic boundary 200 million years ago, and the Siberian Traps are associated with the end Permian extinction 250 million years ago, and now we also know that a big volcanic eruption in China called the Emeishan Traps is associated with the end-Guadalupian extinction 260 million years ago," Richards said. "Then you have the Deccan eruptions -- including the largest mapped lava flows on Earth -- occurring 66 million years ago coincident with the KT mass extinction. So what really happened at the KT boundary?"

Richards teamed up with experts in many areas to try to discover faults with his radical idea that the impact triggered the Deccan eruptions, but instead came up with supporting evidence. Renne, a professor in residence in the UC Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Science and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, re-dated the asteroid impact and mass extinction two years ago and found them essentially simultaneous, but also within approximately 100,000 years of the largest Deccan eruptions, referred to as the Wai subgroup flows, which produced about 70 percent of the lavas that now stretch across the Indian subcontinent from Mumbai to Kolkata.

Michael Manga, a professor in the same department, has shown over the past decade that large earthquakes -- equivalent to Japan's 9.0 Tohoku quake in 2011 -- can trigger nearby volcanic eruptions. Richards calculates that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater might have generated the equivalent of a magnitude 9 or larger earthquake everywhere on Earth, sufficient to ignite the Deccan flood basalts and perhaps eruptions many places around the globe, including at mid-ocean ridges.

"It's inconceivable that the impact could have melted a whole lot of rock away from the impact site itself, but if you had a system that already had magma and you gave it a little extra kick, it could produce a big eruption," Manga said.

Similarly, Deccan lava from before the impact is chemically different from that after the impact, indicating a faster rise to the surface after the impact, while the pattern of dikes from which the supercharged lava flowed -- "like cracks in a soufflé," Renne said -- are more randomly oriented post-impact.

"There is a profound break in the style of eruptions and the volume and composition of the eruptions," said Renne. "The whole question is, 'Is that discontinuity synchronous with the impact?'"

Reawakened volcanism

Richards, Renne and graduate student Courtney Sprain, along with Deccan volcanology experts Steven Self and Loÿc Vanderkluysen, visited India in April 2014 to obtain lava samples for dating, and noticed that there are pronounced weathering surfaces, or terraces, marking the onset of the huge Wai subgroup flows. Geological evidence suggests that these terraces may signal a period of quiescence in Deccan volcanism prior to the Chicxulub impact. Apparently never before noticed, these terraces are part of the western Ghats, a mountain chain named after the Hindu word for steps.

"This was an existing massive volcanic system that had been there probably several million years, and the impact gave this thing a shake and it mobilized a huge amount of magma over a short amount of time," Richards said. "The beauty of this theory is that it is very testable, because it predicts that you should have the impact and the beginning of the extinction, and within 100,000 years or so you should have these massive eruptions coming out, which is about how long it might take for the magma to reach the surface."

This story is taken from Science Daily

Britain’s oldest sauropod dinosaur identified from fossil bone that fell from a cliff face

Experts have identified Britain's oldest sauropod dinosaur from a fossil bone discovered on the Yorkshire coast. The vertebra (backbone) originates from a group of dinosaurs that includes the largest land animals to have ever walked on Earth. This new sauropod dinosaur, from the Middle Jurassic Period at about 176 million years old, was found near Whitby, Yorkshire, after it fell out of a cliff face. This find represents the earliest skeletal record of this type of dinosaur from the United Kingdom and adds to existing evidence from Yorkshire dinosaur tracks that this part of the country was once Britain's very own 'Jurassic World'.

The vertebra (backbone) originates from a group of dinosaurs that includes the largest land animals to have ever walked on Earth. This new sauropod dinosaur, from the Middle Jurassic Period at about 176 million years old, was found near Whitby, Yorkshire, after it fell out of a cliff face. This find represents the earliest skeletal record of this type of dinosaur from the United Kingdom and adds to existing evidence from Yorkshire dinosaur tracks that this part of the country was once Britain's very own 'Jurassic World'.
Sauropods (often referred to as 'brontosaurs') include some of the largest plant-eating dinosaurs to have roamed the Earth and were a successful group for nearly 150 million years. They possessed distinctive long necks and tails, small heads, a large body and walked on all fours. Some species such as the Argentinosaurus grew up to 115 feet (35 metres) long and possibly weighed as much as 80 tonnes.
The fragmentary nature of the new find from Yorkshire means it is not possible to generate a new species of dinosaur. However, this fossil clearly belongs to this distinctive group of titanic sized animals, the sauropods. This dinosaur fossil is an extremely rare find, given the Middle Jurassic rocks of the world are only exposed in a few areas, such as China and Argentina where similar-aged dinosaur fossils originate.
Professor Phil Manning and his team from The University of Manchester used X-Ray Tomography to study the fossil bone, which is now held in the collections at the Yorkshire Museum in York (UK). They present their description of this new sauropod dinosaur in a paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Professor Manning said: "Many scientists have worked on the amazing dinosaur tracks from the Middle Jurassic rocks of Yorkshire. It was a splendid surprise to come face-to-face with a fossil vertebra from the Jurassic rocks of Yorkshire that was clearly from a sauropod dinosaur
"This fossil offers the earliest 'body fossil' evidence for this important group of dinosaurs in the United Kingdom, but it is impossible to define a new species based upon this single bone."
Whilst this is clearly frustrating for the team, there is possibly more of this Jurassic titan still to be discovered in the future and only then might it get a new species name. Until more bones are discovered the team have simply nicknamed Britain's oldest sauropod dinosaur, 'Alan', after the finder of this prehistoric beastie (Alan Gurr).
Dr Victoria Egerton (co-author on the paper) added: "The Jurassic Park that was once Yorkshire clearly has much more to offer science in our understanding of the distribution and evolution of dinosaurs."
Dr Mike Romano, another co-author on the paper said: "Dinosaur remains of Middle Jurassic age are generally rare, even on a global scale. So, to find a single distinctive vertebra of that age on the beach at Whitby, and one that represents a new taxon of sauropod dinosaurs, is indeed a (white) feather in the cap for Yorkshire."

This story is taken from Science Daily

Shrinking dinosaurs evolved into flying birds

Scientists have revealed how massive, meat-eating, ground-dwelling dinosaurs evolved into agile flying birds: they just kept shrinking and shrinking, for over 50 million years. 

Today, in the journal Science, the researchers present a detailed family tree of dinosaurs and their bird descendants, which maps out this unlikely transformation.

They showed that the branch of theropod dinosaurs, which gave rise to modern birds, were the only dinosaurs that kept getting inexorably smaller.

"These bird ancestors also evolved new adaptations, such as feathers, wishbones and wings, four times faster than other dinosaurs," says co-author Darren Naish, Vertebrate Palaeontologist at the University of Southampton.

"Birds evolved through a unique phase of sustained miniaturisation in dinosaurs," says lead author Associate Professor Michael Lee, from the University of Adelaide's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the South Australian Museum.

"Being smaller and lighter in the land of giants, with rapidly evolving anatomical adaptations, provided these bird ancestors with new ecological opportunities, such as the ability to climb trees, glide and fly. Ultimately, this evolutionary flexibility helped birds survive the deadly meteorite impact which killed off all their dinosaurian cousins."

Co-author Gareth Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Southampton, adds: "The dinosaurs most closely related to birds are all small, and many of them -- such as the aptly named Microraptor -- had some ability to climb and glide."

The study examined over 1,500 anatomical traits of dinosaurs to reconstruct their family tree. The researchers used sophisticated mathematical modelling to trace evolving adaptions and changing body size over time and across dinosaur branches.

The international team also included Andrea Cau, from the University of Bologna and Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini.

The study concluded that the branch of dinosaurs leading to birds was more evolutionary innovative than other dinosaur lineages. "Birds out-shrank and out-evolved their dinosaurian ancestors, surviving where their larger, less evolvable relatives could not," says Associate Professor Lee

Chickens and turkeys 'closer to dinosaur ancestors' than other bird

New research suggests that chickens and turkeys have experienced fewer gross genomic changes than other birds as they evolved from their dinosaur ancestor.

Professor Darren Griffin and a team at the University's School of Biosciences have conducted research that suggests that chromosomes of the chicken and turkey lineage have undergone the fewest number of changes compared to their ancient avian ancestor, thought to be a feathered dinosaur.

The Kent research is part of a study by a consortium of leading scientists into avian or bird genomes, which tell a story of species evolution. The living descendants of dinosaurs were thought to have undergone a rapid burst of evolution after most dinosaur species were wiped out. The detailed family tree of modern birds has however confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity of more than 10,000 species is barely known.

Professor Griffin explained: 'Bird genomes are distinctive in that they have more tiny microchromosomes than any other vertebrate group. These small packages of gene-rich material are thought to have been present in their dinosaur ancestors.

'We found that the chicken has the most similar overall chromosome pattern to its avian dinosaur ancestor.'

The research, which formed part of a vast study carried out over the past four years by the international Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, involved the analysis of the whole genome structure of the chicken, turkey, Pekin duck, zebra finch and budgerigar.

Professor Griffin and the other leaders of the research team -- Kent colleague Dr Michael Romanov as well as Dr Denis Larkin and Dr Marta Farré from the Royal Veterinary College, University of London -- studied data from a total of 21 avian genomes and one reptile species. The team focused on the six best-assembled genomes to put together a karyotype -- organised profile -- of the dinosaur ancestor for each chromosome.

The researchers also found that the fastest rate of change had occurred in the zebra finch and budgerigar, consistent with more rapid speciation events in songbirds and their relatives.

This story is taken from Science Daily

From chicken to dinosaur: Scientists experimentally 'reverse evolution' of perching toe

A unique adaptation in the foot of birds is the presence of a thumb-like opposable toe, which allows them to grasp and perch.  However, in their dinosaur ancestors, this toe was small and non- opposable, and did not even touch the ground, resembling the dewclaws of dogs and cats. Remarkably, the embryonic development of birds provides a parallel of this evolutionary history: The toe starts out like their dinosaur ancestors, but then its base (the metatarsal) becomes twisted, making it opposable.

"This is one of the clearest examples of how indirect the morphological consequences of genetic change are mediated," Gunter Wagner, evolutionary geneticist and professor at Yale.
Bird embryos move a lot inside the egg during development, and the onset of movement at this toe coincided with the twisting of its base. Botelho also demonstrated that in this toe, genes of cartilage maturation were expressed at a much later stage than other digits: It retains many rapidly dividing stem cells for a much longer period. Such immature cartilage is highly plastic and easily transformed by muscular activity.
These observations suggested the toe is twisted as a result of mechanical forces imposed on it by the embryonic musculature. Definitive proof, however, would come from experiments. When Botelho applied Decamethonium bromide, a pharmacological agent capable of paralyzing embryonic musculature, the result was a non-opposable toe with a straight, non-twisted base identical to that of their dinosaur ancestors. Only a few experiments are known to recover dinosaur traits in birds (such as a dinosaur-like shank and tooth-like structures). The undoing of the perching digit is thus an important new addition, and the results have now been published in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal of the Nature Publishing Group.
The significance of this experiment, however, goes beyond the fact that a dinosaur-like toe is being retrieved. Evolutionary research often centers on mutations, but the development and evolution of the perching toe cannot be understood without the forces of embryonic muscular activity. The study is described as "true developmental mechanics" by Gunter Wagner, an evolutionary geneticist and professor at Yale. "This is one of the clearest examples of how indirect the morphological consequences of genetic change are mediated. The experiments prove that interactions about organ systems channel the directions of organismal evolution."