Dinos Issued a Climate Warning 215M Years Ago

Sauropods avoided volatile tropics in Triassic

Only small, carnivorous dinosaurs could have survived these conditions, a study finds.   (Victor Leshyk

 

Newser

 Scientists have long been baffled by a lack of Triassic period fossils from large, herbivorous dinosaurs known as sauropods near the equator. A new study offers some illumination: It suggests a hot, unpredictable climate and high carbon dioxide levels kept some of the world's first dinosaurs away—and may shed light on our own issues with climate change. Researchers first analyzed ancient sedimentary rocks in New Mexico, which would have been much closer to the equator as part of the supercontinent Pangea some 215 million years ago, reports LiveScience. In separating carbon isotopes from fossilized organic matter, they identified significant and rapid changes to the ecosystem and atmospheric CO2 levels—which were four to six times those of today. Pollen and spores suggested available plants varied in quantity based on the frequent changes, while fossil charcoal showed evidence of wildfires every few dozen years that wreaked havoc on vegetation.                                                                

The combined factors suggest an environment too unstable for sauropods until about 30 million years later, though small, carnivorous dinosaurs did populate the area. "The conditions would have been something similar to the arid Western United States today, although there would have been trees and smaller plants near streams and rivers and forests during humid times," study author Jessica Whiteside explains in a press release. Eerily, she writes at the Conversation that "rapid climate swings and extremes of drought and intense heat driven by increasing atmospheric CO2 levels have as much ability to alter the vegetation supporting modern human populations as they did for the large plant-eating dinosaurs in the Triassic." Whiteside adds we can expect "profound challenges to human sustainability in the future if we experience the high CO2 conditions predicted to develop in the coming 100 to 200 years." (Scientists made an incredible discovery inside "crap" dino fossils.)

Toxic oceans played a huge part in prehistoric mass extinction

 Walt Bonner

Fox News

 

A woman looks up at a replica skeleton during a preparation for an exhibition titled "The Dawn of the Dinosaurs", displaying fossils, replicas of the creatures and skeletons from the Triassic age, at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo July 2, 2010. (REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao)

An oxygen-depleted ocean played a huge role in the prehistoric mass-extinction that occurred at the end of the Triassic Period, new research revealed. According to a study to be published in Geology, changes in the biochemical balance of the Panathalassic Ocean– one of two oceans that surrounded the supercontinent Pangea – were a critical factor in the extinction where half of the Earth’s animal, plant, and marine life died.

The Triassic period saw the emergence of dinosaurs, who became the dominant animal life form during the subsequent Jurassic period.

 

“This is significant because it is the first time an open ocean setting was investigated,” Study Co-author Jessica Whiteside of the University of Southampton in the U.K., told FoxNews.com. “Previous work focused on shallow coastal areas in what is now Europe, where regional effects could predominate. Thus, by studying the Panathalassic Ocean, we provided strong evidence that these environmental changes were global in nature.”
When Pangea broke apart 201 million years ago, volcanic rifts spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. While this created a rise in temperatures from the greenhouse effect, the huge spike in carbon dioxide brought about a massive chemical bio-imbalance in the Earth’s oceans. When the oceans’ surface waters that were exposed to the sun (the photic zone) lost oxygen, they became toxic by way of hydrogen sulfide – an extremely poisonous chemical produced by microorganisms that don’t need oxygen to survive. This process is called photic zone euxinia (PZE).
To find rocks that lay at the bottom of the Panathalassic Ocean during this period, the researchers travelled to the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. “We of course did not know if the Canadian rocks would contain evidence of PZE, only that they were deposited in well-mixed and rather deep oceanic waters of the Panathalassic Ocean, in contrast to earlier studies that [focused on] terrestrial and very shallow marine sediments,” Whiteside told FoxNews.com. “We wanted to test the hypothesis that PZE was more widespread than just the shallow marine environment, and therefore of potential global, rather than local, significance.” The team knew that if there was evidence of PZE, the rocks were comprised of the right sediment to preserve the indicative molecules.

To find these molecules, which are so small they couldn’t even be seen under a light microscope, the team had to take the sediment samples to a lab. After chemically isolating the fossilized organic cells from the sediment in the lab, Whiteside and her colleagues measured the molecules (or biomarkers) from the cells’ fat membranes.
“In their structural formulae, these molecules record environmental conditions,” Whiteside explained. “Because we know how they affect the environment today, and how the environment affects them, we can infer what happened in the geologic past if we know their concentrations.” For example, the researchers knew that the presence of green sulfur bacteria today indicates an environment where there is light and hydrogen sulfide, but little oxygen (green sulfur bacteria is found in volcanic hot springs, salt marsh sediments, and in the depths of freshwater lakes). As noted earlier, hydrogen sulfide is a by-product of anaerobic organisms and is extremely toxic to most forms of life.
“Thus,” concluded Whiteside, “if we find biomarker evidence for green sulfur bacteria in the geologic record, we can infer that oxygen is depleted and levels of hydrogen sulfide also increased during that time. Our study demonstrates that for the mass extinction 201 million years ago, hydrogen sulfide poisoning disrupted the distribution of nutrients and altered food chains essential for the survival of marine ecosystems in the area. All this, from tiny bits of fat.”
She notes it took dozens of thousands of years for the rise in carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases to bring about the mass extinction, which on a geologic timescale is nearly instantaneous.
Though there were no polar ice caps at the end of the Triassic– and the carbon dioxide levels were higher– Whiteside warns that it bears a strong resemblance to the world we live in today, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. “The amount of CO2 released during the extinction, and the speed at which it was released, is very similar to what is occurring today, and thus serves as a cautionary tale for what might be in store for us in the near future.”

Found in Michigan backyard: 42 mastodon bones

By John Johnson

Fox News

Ancient mastodon vertebrae bones that Dan LaPoint unearthed excavating a pond on Eric Witzke's property outside Olivet, in Bellevue Township, Mich. (AP Photo/The State Journal, Rod Sanford)

Eric Witzke's home is in Bellevue Township, Michigan, but he is clearly not the first one to roam his yard. While he and neighbor Daniel LaPoint were excavating a backyard pond, they happened upon more than 40 mastodon bones, reports ABC News.

An expert from the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology confirmed the find and says the bones are from a male mastodon, about age 40, that lived between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago, reports the Lansing State Journal.

The two unexpected archaeologists plan to donate the Ice Age bones to the museum. "Finding them was very, very cool," says LaPoint, while the museum official is happy about the "the new perspective, the new information, that specimens like these can bring." It's not uncommon for bones from the elephant ancestor to turn up in various parts of Michigan, though sometimes the discovery is of a single tusk.

In Alaska, meanwhile, the study of mastodon teeth has solved a longstanding puzzle, reports Alaska Dispatch News. Carbon dating had suggested that mastodons roamed Alaska between 10,000 and 75,000 years ago, but that never quite made sense: Alaska had few trees then and mastodons had teeth tailor-made for chomping wood.

The new study of tooth enamel shows that mastodons were in the region much earlier, about 120,000 years ago, when trees were more plentiful. (A newly discovered fossil reveals that Scotland once had something akin to a sea monster.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Michigan Neighbors Unearth Mastodon Bones in Backyard

Photos of Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs

Click on the link to view more photos

http://www.livescience.com/44540-pterosaur-photos.html

Missing Half of Bone Reveals Prehistoric Sea Giant

By Wynne Parry, Live Science Contributor

At first, Gregory Harpel thought the dark-brown object he found was just a stone. But it was oddly placed, resting in an isolated spot on a grassy embankment along a creek in Monmouth County, N.J. A closer look confirmed he had found something much more interesting.
"I started seeing the little holes in the bone that the blood vessels go through," said Harpel, an amateur fossil hunter who made this discovery in 2012. "I thought maybe it was a dinosaur of some sort."
The fossil didn't turn out to be from a dinosaur. But thanks to a number of coincidences, Harpel had just made an unprecedented discovery that would reveal the existence of an ancient ocean giant. [See Photos of the Newly Discovered Giant's Bones]

Half a humerus
At the New Jersey State Museum, David Parris, curator of natural history, was able to identify the mystery object: It was the lower half of an upper forelimb bone of a sea turtle that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. Parris remembered looking at another broken sea-turtle forelimb bone in a collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia.
"He said offhandedly, 'Maybe we ought to take it to the Academy [of Natural Sciences] and see if it fits," said Jason Schein, the assistant natural history curator at the New Jersey State Museum. "Dave was half joking, thinking that could never, ever happen."
Even so, Schein brought Harpel's bone to the Academy. They put the two pieces of fossilized bone together, and aside from a few chips around the edge of the break, they fit perfectly. Harpel's half would have attached to the turtle's elbow, while the Academy's half would have attached to its shoulder, forming a complete bone known as the humerus.
The history behind the Academy's piece of bone makes this story even more extraordinary. It's not clear when or how the 202-year-old Academy acquired the fossil, but the first scientific description of it in 1849 identified it as belonging to an ancient sea turtle. This means the first half of this sea-turtle fossil was discovered at least 163 years, and most likely more, before Harpel found the second half. [6 Strange Species Discovered in Museums]
"Unfortunately, things were not as well documented in those days," said Ted Daeschler, associate curator of vertebrate zoology at the Academy.
The first half of a humerus offered enough information that the species to which it belonged could be named Atlantochelys mortoni. For more than 160 years, it remained the only piece of this turtle ever found.
An unprecedented discovery
Paleontologists can sometimes return to the site where a specimen was removed and find other fossils missed by the earlier excavation. And pieces of museum specimens can be misplaced and then rediscovered many years later. "But no one has ever found another part of a single bone 163 years apart," Schein said. "To say this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience is shortchanging it, because it has never happened before."
The paleontologists think the bone was buried in one piece and then broke in two when it eroded from its original burial. Reunited, these halves tell paleontologists more about the turtle to which they belonged. "It turns out to be an amazing animal," Daeschler said.
Based on the size of the full humerus, the researchers can estimate the size of the turtle, which they put at about 3 meters (9.8 feet) from nose to tail. That makes the animal among the largest sea turtles ever to have lived. The loggerhead turtle appears to be its closest living relative, he said.
Because of the lack of records for the Academy's half of the fossil, paleontologists had no idea what rock formation produced it. Harpel's discovery made it possible for them to pinpoint the Mount Laurel Formation, which was deposited below a shallow sea, in which sharks and now-extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs also swam, about 75 million years ago.
"It's all part of painting a picture of the past," Daeschler said. "I think those are the really important scientific discoveries here."
The researchers describe the discovery in the 2014 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

http://www.livescience.com/44345-missing-fossil-reveals-giant-sea-turtle.html

Humans to Blame for Giant Bird's Extinction

By Megan Gannon, News Editor

Fossils are all that's left of the giant wingless birds called moa that once roamed New Zealand. These big-bodied megaherbivores, some of them weighing up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms), disappeared soon after Polynesians colonized the islands in the late 13th century.
Some researchers had argued the nine species of moa were already in decline by the time humans entered the scene. Others had proposed the birds' population collapsed in the wake of volcanic eruptions or the spread of diseases, before they ever met Homo sapiens. A new study, however, suggests humans are responsible for the birds' demise.
"Elsewhere the situation may be more complex, but in the case of New Zealand the evidence provided by ancient DNA is now clear: The megafaunal extinctions were the result of human factors," Mike Bunce, a professor at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]

      

An artist's rendition of an eagle attacking two extinct New Zealand moa. Credit: John Megahan View full size image

By looking at the genetic profiles of 281 individual fossil specimens, Bunce and colleagues pieced together the demographic trends across four different species of moa during the 5,000 years leading up to their extinction. They say they found no genetic signatures of decline.On the contrary, genetic diversity remained consistent and the moa gene pools were "extremely stable throughout their last 5,000 years," said Morten Allentoft, who was a doctoral student in Bunce's lab.
One species, the South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus), even seemed to be experiencing a population boom with as many as 9,200 individuals roaming about by the time Polynesians landed on New Zealand's shores.
"If anything it looks like their populations were increasing and viable when humans arrived," Allentoft said in a statement. "Then they just disappeared."
Archaeological evidence shows that moa were hunted voraciously and vanished just one or two centuries after humans showed up in New Zealand. In addition to overhunting, other indirect human impacts could have contributed to the moa's quick decline, including fires and the introduction of invasive species.
Bunce believes there are lessons to be learned from the moa's extinction.
"As a community we need to be more aware of the impacts we are having on the environment today and what we, as a species, are responsible for in the past," Bunce said.
The research was detailed this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.livescience.com/44291-humans-to-blame-for-giant-birds-extinction.html
 

Dinosaur dubbed 'chicken from hell' was armed and dangerous

 

The dinosaur Anzu wyliei 'looks like something that was placed in the Cretaceous by a Hollywood monster movie director'. Illustration: Mark Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural History

 

Ian Sample, science correspondent

 

Feathered beast, Anzu wyliei, was built for speed, measured three metres from beak to tail and had long, sharp claws

 

The fossilised remains of a bizarre, bird-like dinosaur, nicknamed the "chicken from hell" by scientists, have been unearthed in the US.
The 66-million-year-old feathered beast would have resembled a beefed-up emu with a long neck, a metre-long tail and a tall crest on its head. At the end of its forelimbs were long, sharp claws. The creature stood 1.5 metres high at the hip and reached more than three metres from beak to tail. Researchers believe it lived on ancient floodplains and fed on plants, small animals and possibly eggs. An adult weighed up to 300kg.
Researchers dug the remains from mudstone in the Hell Creek formation in North and South Dakota, where fossil hunters have previously excavated bones from Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops. Over the past decade they have recovered three partial skeletons of the animal but until now had not recognised it as a new genus and species of a mysterious family of dinosaurs called Caenagnathidae. The fossils are being kept at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
Scientists working on the remains coined the "chicken from hell" monicker, which later influenced their choice of its more formal name, Anzu wyliei. Anzu is the name of a giant bird-like demon from ancient mythology. Wyliei comes from Wylie J Tuttle, the son of a donor who helps to fund research at the museum.
The animal belongs to a group called the oviraptorosaurs, which are mostly known from fossils found in central and east Asia but the remains provide the first detailed picture of the North American oviraptorosaurs.
"For almost a hundred years, the presence of oviraptorosaurs in North America was only known from a few bits of skeleton, and the details of their appearance and biology remained a mystery," said Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. "With the discovery of A. wyliei, we finally have the fossil evidence to show what this species looked like and how it is related to other dinosaurs."
Anzu had the build of a fast runner and with substantial claws at the tips of its forelimbs was well-equipped to fight. A close inspection of the fossils revealed that two showed signs of skirmishes. One had a healed broken rib. Another had an arthritic toe that was probably caused by a tendon being ripped off the bone. The fossils are described in the journal Plos One.

 

                       An artist's impression of A. wyliei. Illustration: Bob Walters

"Whether these injuries were the result of combat between two individuals or an attack by a larger predator remains a mystery," said Emma Schachner, a palaeontologist at the University of Utah.
Anzu is not the largest of the oviraptorosaurs found to date. The aptly named Gigantoraptor discovered in Inner Mongolia in 2005 grew to around eight metres long and weighed more than a tonne. "We're finding that the caenagnathids were an amazingly diverse bunch of dinosaurs," said Matthew Lamanna at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
"Whereas some were turkey-sized, others like Anzu and Gigantoraptor, were the kind of thing you definitely wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley."
"We jokingly call this thing the 'chicken from hell' and I think that's pretty appropriate," Lamanna added.
"These fossils are some of the most interesting new dinosaurs to come out of North America over the past decade," said Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh.
"Oviraptorosaurs are one of the most bizarre groups of dinosaurs to ever live. This new dinosaur, Anzu, looks like something that was placed in the Cretaceous by a Hollywood monster movie director. Looking at these animals, it's hard to believe they were real. They had big crests on their skulls, a beak, no teeth, and a very bird-like skeleton."
Brusatte added that the new fossils provided a glimpse of what the skeleton of the North American oviraptorosaurus was like, and showed that they were highly unusual. "Anzu would have lived alongside T. rex, and believe it or not, T. rex was a close cousin. But Anzu was an entirely different type of dinosaur: a fast-running, ecological generalist that didn't quite fit the usual moulds of meat-eating or plant-eating dinosaur."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/19/dinosaur-chicken-hell-anzu-wyliei