WFS

Formation of sedimentary layers of white clay, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site for wood fossils, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site in Kerala, India

Fossil wood park maintained by geological survey of India at Tamilnadu

Cretaceous fossil sites india

Fossils in rack:-Cyad

Fossils in rack:-echiniderms

Fossils in rack:-Rastellum sp

Pre-historic seabed, Cretaceous period

Molten Magma Can Survive in Upper Crust for Hundreds of Millennia

October 15th, 2013

Riffin

Reservoirs of silica-rich magma — the kind that causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions — can persist in Earth’s upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without triggering an eruption, according to new University of Washington modeling research.

That means an area known to have experienced a massive volcanic eruption in the past, such as Yellowstone National Park, could have a large pool of magma festering beneath it and still not be close to going off as it did 600,000 years ago.

“You might expect to see a stewing magma chamber for a long period of time and it doesn’t necessarily mean an eruption is imminent,” said Sarah Gelman, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences.

The formations in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, in Yellowstone National Park, are an example of silica-rich volcanic rock. (Credit: Sarah Gelman/UW)

Recent research models have suggested that reservoirs of silica-rich magma, or molten rock, form on and survive for geologically short time scales — in the tens of thousands of years — in the Earth’s cold upper crust before they solidify. They also suggested that the magma had to be injected into the Earth’s crust at a high rate to reach a large enough volume and pressure to cause an eruption.

But Gelman and her collaborators took the models further, incorporating changes in the crystallization behavior of silica-rich magma in the upper crust and temperature-dependent heat conductivity. They found that the magma could accumulate more slowly and remain molten for a much longer period than the models previously suggested.

Gelman is the lead author of a paper explaining the research published in the July edition of Geology. Co-authors are Francisco Gutiérrez, a former UW doctoral student now with Universidad de Chile in Santiago, and Olivier Bachmann, a former UW faculty member now with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

There are two different kinds of magma and their relationship to one another is unclear. Plutonic magma freezes in the Earth’s crust and never erupts, but rather becomes a craggy granite formation like those commonly seen in Yosemite National Park. Volcanic magma is associated with eruptions, whether continuous “oozing” types of eruption such as Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano or more explosive eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines or Mount St. Helens in Washington state.

Some scientists have suggested that plutonic formations are what remain in the crust after major eruptions eject volcanic material. Gelman believes it is possible that magma chambers in the Earth’s crust could consist of a core of partially molten material feeding volcanoes surrounded by more crystalline regions that ultimately turn into plutonic rock. It is also possible the two rock types develop independently, but those questions remain to be answered, she said.

The new work suggests that molten magma reservoirs in the crust can persist for far longer than some scientists believe. Silica content is a way of judging how the magma has been affected by being in the crust, Gelman said. As the magma is forced up a column from lower in the Earth to the crust, it begins to crystallize. Crystals start to drop out as the magma moves higher, leaving the remaining molten rock with higher silica content.

“These time scales are in the hundreds of thousands, even up to a million, years and these chambers can sit there for that long,” she said.

Even if the molten magma begins to solidify before it erupts, that is a long process, she added. As the magma cools, more crystals form giving the rock a kind of mushy consistency. It is still molten and capable of erupting, but it will behave differently than magma that is much hotter and has fewer crystals.

The implications are significant for volcanic “arcs,” found near subduction zones where one of Earth’s tectonic plates is diving beneath another. Arcs are found in various parts of the world, including the Andes Mountains of South America and the Cascades Range of the Pacific Northwest.

Scientists have developed techniques to detect magma pools beneath these arcs, but they cannot determine how long the reservoirs have been there. Because volcanic magma becomes more silica-rich with time, its explosive potential increases.

“If you see melt in an area, it’s important to know how long that melt has been around to determine whether there is eruptive potential or not,” Gelman said. “If you image it today, does that mean it could not have been there 300,000 years ago? Previous models have said it couldn’t have been. Our model says it could. That doesn’t mean it was there, but it could have been there.”

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Scientiﬁc and Technological Research Commission of Chile.

Ancient DNA Unravels Europe’s Genetic Diversity

October 14th, 2013

Riffin

Ancient DNA recovered from a time series of skeletons in Germany spanning 4,000 years of prehistory has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern-day Europeans.

The study, published today in Science, reveals dramatic population changes with waves of prehistoric migration, not only from the accepted path via the Near East, but also from Western and Eastern Europe.

Ancient DNA recovered from a time series of skeletons in Germany spanning 4,000 years of prehistory has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern-day Europeans. (Credit: © Malgorzata Kistryn / Fotolia)

The research was a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), at the University of Adelaide, researchers from the University of Mainz, the State Heritage Museum in Halle (Germany), and National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project. The teams used mitochondrial DNA (maternally inherited DNA) extracted from bone and teeth samples from 364 prehistoric human skeletons ‒ ten times more than previous ancient DNA studies.

“This is the largest and most detailed genetic time series of Europe yet created, allowing us to establish a complete genetic chronology,” says joint-lead author Dr Wolfgang Haak of ACAD. “Focussing on this small but highly important geographic region meant we could generate a gapless record, and directly observe genetic changes in ‘real-time’ from 7,500 to 3,500 years ago, from the earliest farmers to the early Bronze Age.”

“Our study shows that a simple mix of indigenous hunter-gatherers and the incoming Near Eastern farmers cannot explain the modern-day diversity alone,” says joint-lead author Guido Brandt, PhD candidate at the University of Mainz. “The genetic results are much more complex than that. Instead, we found that two particular cultures at the brink of the Bronze Age 4,200 years ago had a marked role in the formation of Central Europe’s genetic makeup.”

Professor Kurt Alt (University of Mainz) says: “What is intriguing is that the genetic signals can be directly compared with the changes in material culture seen in the archaeological record. It is fascinating to see genetic changes when certain cultures expanded vastly, clearly revealing interactions across very large distances.” These included migrations from both Western and Eastern Europe towards the end of the Stone Age, through expanding cultures such as the Bell Beaker and the Corded Ware (named after their pots).

“This transect through time has produced a wealth of information about the genetic history of modern Europeans,” says ACAD Director Professor Alan Cooper. “There was a period of stasis after farming became established and suitable areas were settled, and then sudden turnovers during less stable times or when economic factors changed, such as the increasing importance of metal ores and secondary farming products. While the genetic signal of the first farming populations becomes increasingly diluted over time, we see the original hunter-gatherers make a surprising comeback.”

Dr Haak says: “None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history.” The international team has been working closely on the genetic prehistory of Europeans for the past 7-8 years and is currently applying powerful new technologies to generate genomic data from the specimens.

World Fossil Society Found Bivalve fossils from an unrecorded fossil site in South India

October 13th, 2013

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Pictures of miocene origin Bivalves From the unrecorded geological site of South India. Congratulations to our Explorers and advisory geologists/Paleontologists.

Photo Courtesy World Fossil Society

The oyster Crassostrea Sp is one of the commonest fossils found in the miocene . The calcite shell is thick and survives well after weathering and erosion of the clays and shales in which it is fossilized. It is also sufficiently resilient to have endured transportation by rivers and bio eroded specimens of Crassostrea Sp are often found in estuary-deposited boulder clays .

Photo Courtesy World Fossil Society

Some specimens consist of disarticulated valves oriented both convex-up and convex-down whereas conjoined shells are predominant in number and arranged with different orientations from nearly horizontal to oblique. A few complete shells show a vertical position with the commissural plane more or less perpendicular to the bottom and the ligamental area pointing downwards. Fragmentation and abrasion are scarce, signs of encrustation and bioerosion are rare and occur only on the external surface of few valves.

Photo Courtesy World Fossil Society

The trace fossil assemblage described herein is dominated by the ichnogenera Gastrochaenolites and Entobia, which often are accompanied by worm borings such as Maeandropolydora. This assemblage belongs to the Entobia Ichnofacies .

Photo Courtesy World Fossil Society

Riffin T Sajeev & Russel T Sajeev (Photo Courtesy World Fossil Society)

Fossil bird from 125 million years ago shows some dinosaur traits

October 12th, 2013

Riffin

BEIJING, Oct. 8 (UPI) — A bird 125 million years ago had two distinct kinds of feathers, resembling those of non-flying feathered reptiles and modern birds, Chinese researchers say.A new analysis of the fossil Jeholornis, first described more than a decade ago, revealed a previously unrecognized second group of flight feathers at the base of its tail, Zhonghe Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing said.”We did not expect to find this new structure,” he told New Scientist.

A modern bird-style tail has been found in the early bird Jeholornis, seen in detail in the inset. Credit: O’Connor et al/Chinese Academy of Sciences

Like the tails of modern birds, these formed an airfoil that could have provided control during flight, the researchers said.

Previously it had been thought Jeholornis only had feathers at the tip of its tail, largely useless for flight, similar to the tail feathers of some dinosaurs like the flightless Caudipteryx.

“We believe that the fan at the base of the tail mainly helps to streamline the body and reduce drag,” Zhou said. They could have also generated more lift than the feathers along the tail of the most primitive bird, Archaeopteryx, making it more useful for flight, he said.

The find raises new questions about feather evolution, leaving the place of Jeholornis in the avian family tree somewhat unclear, Michael Habib of the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study, said.

“This could be an intermediate form or an ‘evolutionary experiment’, which left no descendants,” Habib told New Scientist.

Iron Melt Network Helped Grow Earth’s Core, Study Suggests

October 9th, 2013

Riffin

Stanford scientists recreated the intense pressures and temperatures found deep within Earth, resulting in a discovery that complicates theories of how the planet and its core were formed.

The same process that allows water to trickle through coffee grinds to create your morning espresso may have played a key role in the formation of the early Earth and influenced its internal organization, according to a new study by scientists at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences.

n a rock and metal sample created by Stanford scientists to mimic the make up of the early Earth mantle, drops of molten iron merge to form a network. In this X-ray tomography image of the sample, the channels labeled in blue are interconnected. (Credit: Crystal Shi)

The finding, published in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, lends credence to a theory first proposed nearly half a century ago suggesting that Earth’s iron-rich core and layered internal structure might have formed in a series of steps that took place over millions of years under varying temperature and pressure conditions.

“We know that Earth today has a core and a mantle that are differentiated. With improving technology, we can look at different mechanisms of how this came to be in a new light,” said study leader Wendy Mao, an assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Stanford, and of photon sciences at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by the university.

Earth’s innards are presently divided into layers, with the rocky mantle composed mostly of silicates overlying an iron-rich metallic core. How the planet came to have this orderly arrangement is a major mystery, especially since scientists think its beginnings were messy and chaotic, the result of small bodies made up of rock and metals crashing and clumping together shortly after the formation of the sun and the birth of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago.

How did Earth evolve from this conglomerated mass of rocks and metals into its current layered state?

Separating metal from rock

One idea is that the heat generated by the collisions and by the radioactive decay of certain isotopes warmed Earth. The planet could have gotten so hot that its rocks and metals melted. The molten rocks and metals in this “magma ocean” would then have separated into distinct layers as a result of their different densities. Iron would have drifted downward towards the planet’s center, while silicates remained on top.

Other scientists have proposed that even if the early Earth’s temperature was not hot enough to melt silicates, the molten iron might still have separated out by percolating through the solid silicate layer.

The thought was that pockets of molten iron trapped in the mantle layer could tunnel through the surrounding rock to create channels, or capillaries. This network of tunnels could have helped funnel molten iron towards the planet’s center to join the spherical metallic heart that was slowly amassing there.

However, this “percolation” theory was dealt a major blow when scientists discovered that, in the upper mantle layer at least, the molten iron tended to form isolated spheres that didn’t interact with one another, similar to the way water beads up on a waxed surface.

For this reason, scientists had previously thought that percolation couldn’t be possible, Mao said.

Recreating ancient Earth

But a new experiment conducted by Mao and her team uncovered fresh evidence that percolation might still be a viable mechanism for explaining the formation of Earth’s core.

Working with researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC facility, Mao and her team recreated a speck of the molten silicate and iron material that scientists believe existed deep inside the early Earth.

To do this, Mao’s team placed minute amounts of iron and silicate rock into a metal chamber that they then inserted between the tips of two small diamonds. Squeezing these “diamond anvils” together recreated the immense pressures present in Earth’s interior, and a laser beam was used to heat the sample to a high enough temperature to melt the iron.

After the sample cooled, the scientists examined it using X-ray-computed tomography. Tomography creates a three-dimensional image of an object by combining a series of two-dimensional slices. A computer program then helps flesh out the re-creation of the object.

A state-of-the-art X-ray microscope at SLAC allowed Mao’s team to resolve nanometer-scale details in their sample of heated silicates and iron. The higher resolution allowed the scientists to observe never-before-seen changes in the texture and shape of the molten iron and silicates as they responded to the same intense pressures and temperatures that were present deep in the early Earth.

Which happened first?

The experiment confirmed the findings from previous studies that molten iron in the upper mantle tended to form isolated blobs, which would have prevented percolation from happening. “In order for percolation to be efficient, the molten iron needs to be able to form continuous channels through the solid,” Mao explained.

However, the scientists found that at the higher pressures and temperatures that would have been present in the early Earth’s lower mantle, the structure of the silicates changed in a way that permitted connections to form between pockets of molten iron, making percolation possible.

“Scientists had said this theory wasn’t possible, but now we’re saying, under certain conditions that we know exist in the planet, it could happen,” Mao said. “So this brings back another possibility for how the core might have formed.”

The team’s new findings do not rule out the possibility that differentiation began when Earth was in a magma ocean state. In fact, both mechanisms could have occurred, said study first author Crystal Shi, a graduate student in Mao’s lab.

“We don’t know which mechanism happened first, or if the two happened together,” Shi said. “At the very beginning, Earth would have still been very hot, and the magma ocean mechanism could have been important. But later as the planet cooled, percolation may have become the dominant mechanism.”

Scientists from China’s Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington also contributed to this research.

World Fossil Society Predicts A new Cretaceous Bed in South India

October 8th, 2013

Riffin

World fossil society Founder Riffin T sajeev And his brother Russel T sajeev Found A new evidence for the possibility of a cretaceous sediment layer somewhere near Koodankulam,Tamilnadu. WFS group got various cretaceous fossils like Inoceramus,Griphaea etc from this area and ruled out the possibility of mass movement of cretaceous fossils from known cretaceous bed situated in Trichy which is far away from this site. It is interesting that,all fossils from these site have layered structure shell with grey/dark color. Riffin T Sajeev requesting to various geological scientists for help to map this area and find out the exact position of cretaceous bed and its extension.

Credit: Stock photos World Fossil Society

Dinosaur village offers new body of evidence

October 7th, 2013

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BEIJING,Sept. 21 (Xinhuanet) — Scientists are conducting research on a site where an earlier generation of paleontologists had first begun their work, with the hope of unveiling more of the story from the Late Cretaceous period, Cheng Yingqi reports.

The village of Jingangkou, 10 km southeast of Laiyang, Shandong province, is like any farming community. Houses dot the landscape of green patchwork fields. Vegetables grow in the lush soil. But the mountains surrounding the village hold an archeological treasure – large bleached bones. After two months of digging in the red mountainous terrain, paleontologists have excavated more than 200 dinosaur bones since July. “The soil of Laiyang has preserved the most complete remains of dinosaurs living from the Late Cretaceous period (100 to 66 million years ago),” said Wang Xiaolin, a professor of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“And what makes this site so important is that it is one of the few sites that are rich both in dinosaurs and in dinosaur eggs.”

Wang and his team have been carrying out research in Laiyang since 2008.

Their work, Wang said, is like “extending a salute to the older generation”.

In fact, Laiyang is the first dinosaur fossil site in China discovered by Chinese scientists. The earliest excavation dates back to 1923 when Chinese geologist Tan Xichou collected fossils of dinosaur, fish, insects and plants in Jiangjunding (near Jingangkou) and neighboring areas.

The first Laiyang dinosaur, Tanius sinensis, was named in honor of Tan by Carl Wiman, a Swedish paleontologist, in 1929.

In the 1950s, Yang Zhongjian, a leading vertebrate paleontologist in China, led a team to Laiyang.

They dug up fossil vertebrates and recovered China’s first complete dinosaur skeleton Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus Young in 1958.

Also, fossils unearthed in Laiyang helped build up the international classification system and naming system for dinosaur eggs.

In 1984, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology of China was established in Laiyang.

However, as more and more dinosaur and other vertebrate fossil sites were discovered in China, paleontologists swarmed to other sites, and Laiyang faded from scientists’ view.

“The most significant paleontological finds in the recent decade were carried out on the fossil sites in Liaoning province,” Wang said.

Wang led a scientific research team in west Liaoning for 15 years excavating large quantities of amphibian, dinosaur, pterosaur, bird and mammal fossils.

Yet Wang was always attracted by Laiyang, a site of huge potential.

“Geological records show the excavation at Jingangkou was not finished, and the fossils were in a relatively small area, and covered a host of dinosaur species,” Wang said.

“When I saw the geological fault in the mountains and the valley, I knew that this type of landscape preserves fossils.”

The problem was, where to start.

The exact places where Tan Xichou and Yang Zhongjian excavated had been long forgotten.

Wang’s team carried out extensive geological surveys and interviewed elderly residents hoping they would still remember Tan’s excavation 90 years ago.

During the search, the team found a site full of broken dinosaur bones – which they call the second site – and they started the excavation.

One of the aims of this new excavation is to find new species, Wang said.

The nasal features of Tsintaosaurus is one such question.

Previous research indicated the nose of Tsintaosaurus was directed up, different from other known lambeosaurids, a genus dinosaur that lived about 76 to 75 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period.

But tests on Tsintaosaurus, which is currently stored in the Paleozoological Museum of China, show the nasal feature differing from the research, Wang explained. He hopes the excavation can help solve the puzzle.

Also, Wang hopes to uncover a specimen of Tanius sinensis from the Late Crustaceous period.

The only skeleton is stored in Uppsala University, Sweden.

Wang’s work in Laiyang started as early as 2008.

But site conditions held back excavation as Wang tried to protect exposed fossils.

When Wang arrived at the site, the fossilized bones exposed to air had cracked and they had become fragile and powdery.

After spending a harsh winter in Laiyang with the fossils, Wang found that the fossilized bones cracked due to the change of temperature.

“So, if we can keep the fossils from freezing, they will be preserved in better shape.”

In 2009, the city government of Laiyang became involved in protection of the site and its fossils and provided facilities and personnel support for the team.

So why not just move the fossils away to preserve them in a laboratory?

“It depends on your purpose,” Wang said.

If researchers need to dig the fossils out for scientific study it is better to ship them to the laboratory.

But for research purposes, it is better to keep them at the original site, he said.

(Source: China Daily)

Insect plugs gap in fossil record

October 6th, 2013

Riffin

PARIS: One day 370 million years ago, a tiny larva plunged into a shrimp-infested swamp and drowned. Unearthed in modern-day Belgium, the humble bug could plug a giant gap in the fossil record.

Named Strudiella devonica, the eight-millimetre invertebrate – while in far from mint condition – is thought by researchers who published their findings in Nature to be the world’s oldest complete insect fossil.

Strudiella devonica could plug a 50-million-year gap in the fossil record. Credit: Nel et al.

“It has everything an insect should have: the legs, the antennae, the thorax and the abdomen,” said Andre Nel of France’s National History Museum, one of the authors of the study.

Evolutionary roots of the insect kingdom

Scientists until now had few if any confirmed insect fossils from between 385 and 325 million years ago, a period known as the Hexapoda Gap, William A. Shear of Hampden-Sydney College wrote in a comment that accompanied the study.

Strudiella devonica could significantly narrow that gap in the fossil record.

Based on molecular DNA studies, Nel says scientists had long expected to find insect life dating that far back, but the fossil find yields insight into the evolutionary roots of the insect kingdom.

“Insects are an extremely ancient group, but we know very little about the earliest among them,” he explained. “This find enables us to confirm our molecular dating, it’s a palaeontological marker.”

“Two fossilised mandibles account for the whole Devonian”

Nel said science “had a grand total of two fossilised mandibles from Scotland to account for the whole Devonian” – the geological period running from around 415 million to 360 million years ago.

From these isolated fossil fragments, some 400 million years old, fast-forward to a period known as the Carboniferous, 300 to 330 million years ago, and the fossil record teems with insects.

“In between this profusion of creatures of all kinds – cockroaches, dragonflies, grasshoppers – and the earliest specimens, we have nothing,” Nel explained.

“Yet it was precisely at this time that these animals started to diversify, even started to appear since their ancestors were aquatic insects,” he said.

Strong contender for insect, but caution urged

With its six-legged thorax, long single-branched antennae, triangular jaws and 10-segmented abdomen, tiny Strudiella devonica is a strong contender for an insect ID card, Shear argues.

But he also urges a degree of caution, stressing the study is based on interpretation of a single fossil in relatively poor condition.

“What would make it more certain? A better-preserved specimen, especially one that showed more clearly the appendages and mouthparts,” he said.

While the specimen itself does not have wings, the researchers believe that based on the shape of its mandibles – similar to those of a modern-day grasshopper – it is probably the larva of a winged animal.

If correct, that would also mean that winged insects originated much earlier than available fossils have suggested, Shear said.

The fossil was found in a rock slab in a quarry in Belgium, in a strata of very fine, slightly sandy clay – “probably a land animal that landed in a pond teeming with carnivorous shrimps and that miraculously escaped being devoured by them,” Nel said.

High Tooth Replacement Rates in Largest Dinosaurs Contributed to Their Evolutionary Success

October 5th, 2013

Riffin

Rapid tooth replacement by sauropods, the largest dinosaurs in the fossil record, likely contributed to their evolutionary success, according to a research paper by Stony Brook University paleontologist Michael D’Emic, PhD, and colleagues. Published in PLOS ONE, the study also hypothesizes that differences in tooth replacement rates among the giant herbivores likely meant their diets varied, an important factor that allowed multiple species to share the same ecosystems for several million years.

Paleontologists have long wondered how sauropods digested massive amounts of foliage that would have been necessary for their immense sizes. In “Evolution of high tooth replacement rates in sauropod dinosaurs,” the team of paleontologists reveal that their new research into the microscopic structure of sauropod teeth shows the dinosaurs formed and replaced teeth faster than any other type of dinosaurs — more like sharks and crocodiles — and this process kept teeth fresh given the immense amount of wear they underwent from clipping off enormous volumes of food required for them.

This is an illustration of a skull of Diploducus alongside the research team’s CT scan-generated images of some teeth in the front of its jaws. Bone is transparent and teeth are yellow. The arrows show the direction of tooth replacement, which is back to front similar to a shark. (Credit: Image courtesy of Stony Brook University)

“The microscopic structure of teeth and bones records aspects of an animal’s physiology, giving us a window into the biology of long-extinct animals,” said Dr. D’Emic, Research Instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. “We determined that for the gigantic sauropods, each tooth took just a few months to form. Effectively, sauropods took a ‘quantity over quality’ approach.”

Dr. D’Emic explained that unlike mammals and some other dinosaurs, sauropods did not chew their food. They snipped food into smaller pieces before swallowing.

“At least twice during their evolution, sauropods evolved small, peg-like teeth that formed and replaced quickly,” said Dr. D’Emic. “This characteristic may have led to the evolutionary success of sauropods.”

The team developed a novel method to estimate sauropod tooth formation and replacement rate without destructively sampling the teeth by making microscopic sections. Using these estimates, the researchers could track the evolution of tooth formation and replacement rates through time in species whose fossil remains are too rare to section.

With computed tomography (CT) scanning and microscopic anatomical methods, they measured tooth formation time, replacement rate, crown volume and enamel thickness in sectioned teeth of Camarasaurus and Diplodocus, two dinosaurs from the Late Jurassic Formation of North America. The technology and method enabled the researchers to count the number of growth lines in each tooth. Growth lines are a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. A tally of the lines gives the formation of each tooth in days.

To find out how fast these teeth were replaced, D’Emic and colleagues subtracted the ages of successive teeth from one another. The results indicated that replacement in these animals was extremely fast.

“A nearly 100-foot-long sauropod would have had a fresh tooth in each position about every one to two months, sometimes less” said Dr. D’Emic.

The tooth replacement rate, size and shape data collected by the team indicates that despite their somewhat stereotyped body plan and large body size, sauropods exhibited varied approaches to feeding. The paper indicates that this variation “represents a potential factor that allowed multiple giant species such as Camarasurus and Diplodocus to partition the same ecosystem.”

Dr. D’Emic added that the research also contributes to a new view of sauropods, which were once thought to be more primitive than other dinosaur groups such as horned and duckbilled dinosaurs.

The paper co-authors include John Whitlock of Mount Aloysius College, Kathlyn Smith of Georgia Southern University, and Jeffrey Wilson and Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan.

The dinosaur specimens used for the research were loaned to the paleontologists from the Yale Peabody Museum, Utah Museum of Natural History, Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde and the Iziko South African Museum.

Sauropod Dinosaur Facts:

1. Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals that ever walked the land.

2. Familiar examples of sauropods are Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, and Apatosaurus. Apatosaurus was formerly called “Brontosaurus.” These are genera (plural of genus) and should be italicized.

3. Sauropods had tiny heads for their bodies — even a 100-foot-long animal would have a head only slightly larger than that of a horse.

4. Along with their tiny heads, sauropods had tiny teeth, ranging from the diameter of a pencil to a wide marker and only a few inches long.

5. Sauropods did not chew their food, but clipped it and swallowed it, where it was broken down in their digestive system.

6. In living animals, daily incremental lines are laid down in teeth. These lines are thinner than a human hair. The total number of lines indicates how long it took for the tooth to form.

7. Most animals have only one or two replacement teeth in a given socket (or tooth position), but sauropods had up to nine.

8. Sauropod teeth formed quickly — in just a few months.

9. Sauropods replaced their teeth more quickly than most animals, including other dinosaurs. A new tooth was replaced in each tooth position every month or so.

10. Sauropods twice evolved small teeth that formed and replaced quickly.

Massive dinosaur fossil unearthed by Alberta pipeline crew

October 4th, 2013

Riffin

A team of oil pipeline workers digging at a site near Spirit River, Alberta have unearthed an incredible find — a roughly 10-metre-long fossilized dinosaur tail.

“What we have is a totally composed tail,” Brian Brake, the executive director of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, told the Edmonton Journal on Wednesday. “It’s beautiful.”

According to CBC News, the fossil was discovered on Tuesday, by a backhoe operator that accidentally broke a piece of the fossil off while he was digging in the Saddle Hills area, southwest of Spirit River. Apparently, he thought it was a rock, but noticed the rest of the fossil when he was moving the piece out of the way.

A 10-metre-long fossilized dinosaur was found by a pipeline crew working southwest of Spirit River, Alta., on Tuesday. (Courtesy: Tourmaline Oil Corp.)

Work immediately stopped on the site until someone could be brought in to examine the fossil. The oil company reported the find to the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, who in turn called the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller — the agency is responsible for recovering fossils in Alberta. According to CBC News, both the Tyrrell Museum and National Geographic have paleontologists at the site now, and they’ll soon be joined by Dr. Matthew Vavrek, who is the lead paleontologist for the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative.

Additional section of fossil

Although many sources are reporting this find as being 30-metres long, just from the image and using the worker for scale, it’s clear that the fossil much shorter than that. Also, there’s some speculation that it’s the fossilized tail of a hadrosaur — a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the Alberta area roughly 65 million years ago. Responding by email, Brian Brake confirmed that ‘feet’ had been switched to ‘metres’ somewhere along the line, but the details of the exact length of the fossil and what species it came from have yet to be determined. Further updat