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Thursday, March 18, 2010

UAF scientist offers analysis on asteroid and death of dinosaurs

A six-mile-wide asteroid is supposed to have crashed into what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years before, triggering a blast that spread death and destruction around the globe.

UAF scientist Michael Whalen is part of a research team that presented a new analysis to support the theory that an asteroid wiped out the Dinosaurs.

Scientists first proposed the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur mass extinction 30 years before. The discovery of a massive crater at Chicxulub [CHICK-shuh-loob], in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in 1991, supported that hypothesis.

The Chicxulub crater is more than 120 miles wide - about the distance from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle - and scientists consider it was created when an asteroid more than six miles wide crashed into Earth 65 million years ago. The cataclysmic impact - a million times more powerful than the biggest nuclear bomb ever tested - triggered massive earthquakes, atmospheric discharge and oceanic upheaval. The ensuing mass Extinction ended both the reign of the dinosaurs and the Cretaceous period, which provide way to the Paleogene period. This theory, having progressively accumulated evidence, was thought to be a near-consensus view.

Some scientists declare that long-term volcanic activity at the Deccan Traps, in what is now India, caused acid rain and global cooling, gradually making life untenable for the dinosaurs and other large animals. They also propose that the Chicxulub impact occurred some 300,000 years before the mass extinctions.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Colorful Dinosaur found out in China

Many scientists have long idea that Dinosaurs were brown or gray in color. But scientists examining the remains of a dinosaur say they have discover evidence it had brightl -colored feathers.

American and Chinese researchers rebuilt the feathers of a flightless dinosaur named Anchiornis huxleyi. The small, two-legged creature lived about one hundred-fifty million year before. It would have weighed only about 110 grams.

The researchers utilized an electron microscope and fossilized remains of thirty feathers that once covered the animal. The remains were found out in Liaoning Province in China.

Researchers learned melanosomes in the feathers. These small, color-producing structures created as the dinosaur was developing. The researchers compared the structures to the melanosomes that manage the color of feathers on modern birds. They were then able to recognize the colors of the Dinosaur feathers.

The researchers state that Anchiornis huxleyi appeared to have a dark gray or black body. They found that the pinnacle of the ancient creature was light brown in color. It had bright white wings. Each of the feathers had black on the last part.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Dinosaur bone watch declared by Louis Moinet

One of the strangest watches in the world is being presented by Louis Moinet, using real Dinosaur Bones in its mechanics.

Most people anticipate to see dinosaur bones in national museums across the globe, yet one pioneering watch firm is allowing history fans to observe them every time they glance at their wrist.

Louis Moinet has announced its Jurassic Tourbillon, which contains fragments of Dinosaur bones in the dial which are dated at 130 million years old and forms part of a new series of novelty timepieces quite exactly named Time Explorator.

The hand-wound mechanical watch also has an impressive 18 carat white gold case and also comes with a bezel and horns that employ no fewer than 56 Wesselton VVS baguette diamonds.

On top of this, the watch also has three dials, while it uses an anti-reflective sapphire crystal front to ensure that reading it is simple in any situation.

Earlier this week, Happy Hour Watches - a wholly cheaper alternative to the dinosaur watch - revealed that its timepieces let buyers to tell the time and, should they want to, open a bottle of beer at the same time with a fancy clasp.

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Scientists reaffirm theory that giant asteroid killed dinosaurs


A team of scientists has agreed that a giant asteroid killed off Dinosaurs and a majority of other species on Earth more than 65 million years before.

The researchers examined evidence and agreed it supports a single-impact theory first proposed 30 years ago on the cause of the mass extinction.

Since 1980, scientists have gathered an overwhelming amount of evidence that illustrates a single asteroid about 6 miles in diameter and traveling at thousands of miles an hour, slammed into the Gulf of Mexico, said Richard Norris, a paleoceanographer at the University of California San Diego.

The impact caused a crater 24 miles deep and 125 miles wide, according to Norris, who was part of the research group.

The crater was found out in 1991 in Chicxulub, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula, said scientists who called it the "smoking gun" that backed up the asteroid theory.
Norris compared the asteroid's impact with a blast from hundred million tons of TNT.
"It's mostly more powerful than all the atomic weapons on the planet going off all at once," he said.

The researchers wanted to settle disputes about what destroyed the dinosaurs. Some theories have argued that it would have taken many meteorites to cause such a cataclysmic incident. Another rival theory suggested that the mass Extinction was a consequence of a massive volcanic eruption in India that took place around the same time as the impact.

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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Dinosaurs might be older than previously thought

The finding of a dinosaur-like animal that lived 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinos, has suggested that Dinosaurs and other close relatives such as pterosaurs might have also lived much earlier than previously thought.

Asilisaurus kongwe- The new species - shared many characteristics with dinosaurs, but fell just outside of the Dinosaur Family tree.

Asilisaurus kongwe is part of a sister group to dinosaurs identified as silesaurs.
Research into the new species of dinosaurs was carried out by Sterling Nesbitt, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences.

Even though the oldest dinosaurs found out so far are only 230 million years old, the presence of their closest relatives 10 million years earlier implies that silesaurs and the dinosaur lineage had already diverged from common ancestors by 240 million years ago.

Silesaurs are considered dino-like because they share many dinosaur characteristics, but yet lack key characteristics all dinosaurs share.

The relationship between silesaurs and dinosaurs is analogous to the very close relationship of humans and chimps.

Silesaurs continued to survive side by side with early dinosaurs throughout much of the Triassic Period (between about 250 and 200 million years ago).

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Monday, March 8, 2010

Dinosaur's oldest relative discovered

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature ten million years older than the earliest known Dinosaurs.

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years before.

The scientists say that its age proposes that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

They described their discovering in the journal Nature.

The study was led by Dr Sterling Nesbitt from the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

He said: "This new evidence implies that (dinosaurs) were really only one of several large and distinct groups of animals that exploded in diversity in the Triassic period, including silesaurs (like this one), pterosaurs, and several groups of crocodilian relatives."

Dr Randall Irmis from the Utah Museum of Natural History in the US was also occupied in the study. He commented that these groups of creatures - the silesaurs - were the "closest relative of the dinosaurs".

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Prehistoric island 'Jurassic Parkette' ruled by dwarf dinosaurs

Paleontologists have found out a prehistoric "lost world" which was ruled by miniature Dinosaurs. Sort of a pigmy Jurassic Park, the island was the hometown of dinos who were up to 8 times smaller than some of their mainland cousins, reports the Telegraph.

Dwarf Dinosaur fossils were discovered in what is now modern day Romania, in an area known as Hateg, which, 65 million years before - when the creatures were living there - was an island, reports The Telegraph.

One of the fossils was of Magyarosaurus, which was slightly bigger than a horse, but was related to some of the biggest creatures to ever walk the Earth - gigantic titanosaurs such as Argentinosaurus, which reached up to 100 feet long and weighed around 80 tons.

Professor Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol, who carried out the research with scientists at the Universities of Bucharest of and Bonn, said: "Most of the famous dinosaurs that we know about were living on big landmasses at the last part of the Cretaceous period.

The curious thing about Europe at this time was that it was mostly covered by sea and much Eastern Europe was a sort of archipelago of islands.

If you are a gigantic dinosaur on a small island with limited food and space, then the evolutionary pressure is either to go extinct or to get smaller.

The discovering will be published in the scientific journal Palaeogreography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

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Friday, February 26, 2010

World's largest group of dinosaur footprints discovered in Shandong



At present, a large group of Dinosaur footprints were discovered at Zhucheng city, Shandong province.

Paleontologists from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences came to the location and verified the collection to be the largest ever discovered.

The group of footprints is located in an area of more than 2,600 square meters, and more than 3,000 footprints of different kinds of dinosaurs emerge in various shapes and sizes.

This is another significant discovery that follows the discovery of world's largest group of Dinosaur Fossils in the same city.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Giant skulls discovered at Utah's Dinosaur Monument a 'fortuitous' find

Scientists, such as Dan Chure, refer to sauropods, the gigantic, long-necked plant-eating Dinosaurs, as "headless wonders."

Not only are their noggins puny in relation to their colossal bodies, but very hardly do paleontologists ever recover entire sauropod skulls, said Chure, of Dinosaur National Monument. But a fresh species unearthed at the monument several years before was identified from four skulls - two fully intact - found within a few feet of each other.

Abydosaurus mcintoshi was recognized to the world Tuesday in the German science weekly Naturwissenshaften, where Chure published findings with Brigham Young University collaborators. The new sauropod is supposed to be a distant descendant of brachiosaurus, which roamed Utah 150 million years before.

Discovering just one skull would be impressive, but four is beyond what any Dinosaur hunter could hope for. The skulls revealed jaws crammed with dozens of minute teeth.

"It's a fortuitous thing. In numerous dinosaurs, the bones of the head do not fuse up, especially in sauropods. You have an array of components that are held collectively by soft tissue. The only thing that resides together is the brain case," said Brooks Britt, a BYU geology professor.

National Park Service employees initially discovered an interesting cache of bones near the monument's visitor's center in the late 1990s and enlisted Britt's help to prepare the specimens.

The monument is well-known for Dinosaur Discoveries made in late-Jurassic-era Morrison Formation. But these new bones were in the younger Cedar Mountain Formation, a 105-million-year-old sandstone that dates the bones to the middle of the Cretaceous, the 3rd and final chapter of dinosaurs' reign that ended 66 million years ago.

After the initial find, park staff delivered a 3-ton block to BYU's Museum of Paleontology.

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Science Uncovers What Dinosaurs Really Looked Like

Scientists have wonderful powers. They can really go back in time and tell you what Dinosaurs look like. They can notify you where plants and babies come from. They’re similar to wizards in labcoats.

The most latest development? Scientists have decoded the complete-body patterns of a dinosaur, so you can see what it really looked like while it was breathing. And boy, does it seem to be kinda weird. Like something you’d fight in opposition to a Soul Caliber game, or a gigantic turkey that frequents dark Hollywood clubs and raves. Basically, totally bizarre.

How did they perform this? How did they dig up the cosmetology secrets of the dinosaurs that are not live and gone? They took pigments from protofeathers and examined them heavily. So the foremost dinosaur we have in complete color is the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi. It seems like an irritable chicken-monster that will peck out your eyes in your sleep. It seems like Lady Gaga’s guard dog.

My question is, if science has been capable of colorizing dinosaurs, how long is it until we’ll be able to clone them? I predict at the most, two years, at which point you’ll be able to get teacup dinosaurs as house-pets, and try to make sure they don’t shred your pillows that you bought at Barney’s.

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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Free of dinosaurs, birds gorged until flightless

SPOILT for food and with their dinosaur predators recently extinct, few birds put on so much weight they became too fat to fly.

DNA examination of giant birds such as emus and ostriches, led by Australian National University's Matthew Phillips, discloses how birds such as the Australasian emu and cassowary, the now-extinct New Zealand moa, the South American rhea and African ostrich scattered around the globe.

The study proposes that flightless birds known as ratites were not necessarily relics of the super continent Gondwana - which drifted apart 100 million years ago to form continents including Africa, Australia and South America - but were able to fly to new lands.

Dr Phillips, an evolutionary biologist, said molecular dating had proposed that the ancestors of these birds became flightless independently about 65 million years ago, around the similar time Dinosaurs became extinct.

Life without dinosaurs not only eliminated a predator, the birds were left with more vegetation to feed on and could spend more time on the ground foraging without worrying about the need to fly from danger.

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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Dwarf Dinosaurs existed on 'Neverland'-Like Island

Dinosaurs on an island in Transylvania existed small and never really grew up.


Dwarf dinosaurs survived on a Late Cretaceous island, the latest analysis of bones confirms.
• Dwarf dinosaurs appear to have emerged from a process called progenesis, which reduces the developmental period.
• The dwarf dinosaurs existed fast, reaching sexual maturity at earlier ages than their mainland counterparts, and they likely died young.

When Hungarian baron Franz Nopcsa claimed that his sister in 1895 found out bones belonging to dwarf dinosaurs on his family's Transylvanian estate, many thought his claims were on par with Count Dracula fiction.

The latest study not only proves the existence of dwarf dinosaurs, but also explains how dinosaurs shrank during the Late Cretaceous at a Neverland-like place -- Hateg Island, Romania -- where dinos never really grew up.

According to the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, the unusual phenomenon emerges to have only affected few of the island's dinosaur residents.

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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Yale scientists complete colour palette of a dinosaur for the first time


Deciphering microscopic clues buried within Fossils, scientists have uncovered the vibrant colours that adorned a Feathered Dinosaur extinct for 150 million years, a Yale University-led research team reports online Feb. 4 in the journal Science.

Unlike recently published work from China that inferred the existence of two types of melanin pigments in various species of feathered dinosaurs, the Science study analysed colour-imparting structures called melanosomes from an complete fossil of a single animal, a feat which facilitated researchers to disclose rich colour patterns of the entire animal.

In fact, the analysis of melanosomes conducted by Yale team was so precise that the team was able to allocate colours to individual feathers of Anchiornis huxleyi, a four-winged troodontid dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period in China. This Dinosaur sported usually grey body, a reddish-brown, Mohawk-like crest and facial speckles, and white feathers on its wings and legs, with bold black-spangled tips.

'This was no sparrow or crow, but a creature with a very notable plumage,' said Richard O. Prum, chair and the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale and a co-author of the study. 'This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today.'

The colour patterns of the limbs, which strongly look like those sported by modern day Spangled Hamburg chickens, probably functioned in communication and may have helped the dinosaur to attract mates, suggested Prum.

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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Another Loose End Tied Up In Bird-Dino Debate


Let's say you're Haplocheirus sollers. You've got two gangly legs, stubby arms and feathery adornments that look similar to something even a third-class figure skater wouldn't wear. On top of that, you have the ragged claws of a horror film monster, and a tail that seems like something from an overgrown rat.

As Dinosaurs go off, you're an odd bird -- even though you're not a bird at all.
According to a paper in the most up-to-date issue of the journal Science, the newly discovered Haplocheirus is the oldest known member of a group of dinosaurs called alvarezsaurs.

For years, researchers have debated whether alvarezsaurs come down from dinosaurs or birds. The majority accepted that they were dinosaurs, but gaps in the Fossil record -- especially a lack of any alvarezsaur fossils predating birds -- left the issue open to debate.

The discovery of Haplocheirus by a team of paleontologists from George Washington University widen the fossil record of alvarezsaurs back in time by 63 million years -- a good 15 million years before the first birds appeared.

With this innovative evidence that alvarezsaurs existed before birds, there's little room to argue that they could be anything other than dinosaurs. Strange-looking dinosaurs, but dinosaurs, nonetheless.

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Hunting the T-rex on Montana's Dinosaur Trail


About 77 million years before the juvenile duckbill dinosaur was attacked on the plains of what is now known as Montana, US, by a pack of Jurassic predators.
Fatally wounded, the young Brachylophosaurus struggled to the border of an inland sea, where he sank into the soft sand and died.

The salt water mummified him, preserving the wrinkles and scales on his skin and even his final meal of conifers and magnolia-like plants.

He remained buried until he was noticed north of Malta, in central Montana, in 2000.
Named after graffiti carved in a nearby rock, Leonardo is now a worldwide palaeontological star and a foremost attraction at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, one of the stops along Montana's so-called Dinosaur Trail.

The Dinosaur Trail links collectively a series of dinosaur-related museums, laboratories and archaeological sites including the Great Plains Museum.
The idea of a dinosaur trail was daydream for local tourism authorities who wanted to capitalize on the state's wealth of Fossil resources.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Jurassic Park to return to the big screen


Dinosaurs are set to wander on the big screen another time with Hollywood bosses planning to bring a second trilogy of the hit sci-fi franchise Jurassic Park.

The original 1993 film that won 3 Oscars, starring Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, was a massive victory, grossing USD 914 million worldwide and spawning two sequels, Box Office online reported.

Now, nine years after Jurassic Park III hit cinemas in 2001, Joe Johnston, who directed the third installment, confess a new movie is on the cards which will be closely followed by two more.

Jurassic Park IV is going to be presented. And it's going to be distinct anything you've seen. It breaks away from the first three - it's really the beginning of the second Jurassic Park trilogy. It's going to be finished in a completely different way, ‘Johnston said.

If you think of the first three as a trilogy, number four would be the starting of a second trilogy. We just want to make them accepted in their own right. We don't want to create sequel after sequel just because there's a market for it.

We want to tell unusual, interesting stories," he added.

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

South Florida Science Museum presents "Diggin' Dinosaurs: An Adventure Millions of Years in the Making"

Something big is coming to the South Florida Science Museum starting January 16th through May 2nd, 2010. Diggin' Dinosaurs: An Adventure Millions of Years in the Making features many of the most feared terrestrial carnivores including the gigantic Giganotosaurus, a genus of carcharodontosaurid Dinosaur that existed 98 to 96 million years ago, to other larger-than-life predators including, the Monolophosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. This hands-on exhibit allows visitors to experience dinosaurs by handling an Oviraptor egg, excavating a skeleton, or taking a turn at the Wheel of Dinosaur Misfortune.

The South Florida Science Museum is hosting "Diggin' Dinosaurs" as part of the celebration commemorating the finding of Suzie, the Ice Age mastodon currently on display at the Museum. The skeleton was found in superb condition during an excavation project in West Palm Beach in 1969. Suzie was a juvenile mastodon, a type of pre-historic elephant that wandered Florida and much of North America during Earth's most recent Ice Age.

The South Florida Science Museum has been a resource for scientific information for almost a half century with the mission of exciting curiosity and furthering the understanding of science and technology. Through a strong partnership with the School District of Palm Beach County, the Museum serves as a resource for exploring which compliments and supplements formal educational environments. Diggin' Dinosaurs: An Adventure Millions of Years in the Making is a paleontology based exhibition that is expected to welcome school students, as well as residents and visitors from Palm Beach County and beyond.

"Diggin' Dinosaurs" will be open daily to the public January 16, 2010 to May 2, 2010.

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Monday, January 11, 2010

190m-yr-old dino fossils found in Argentina


BUENOS AIRES: A Species of Dinosaur that existed 190 million years ago has been found in Argentina, a researcher said.

No discoveries with these uniqueness had been made in the region. “It's an significant discovery because it helps us understand the environmental diversity of the period," researcher Santiago Bessone of the Museum Egidio Feruglio, an institution based in the Argentine Patagonian city of Trelew that was accountable for the expedition, told EFE.

The experts exposed on Bayo mountain , some 80 km from the Patagonian town of Gastre, fossils of at least two dinosaurs that actually lived during the Jurassic period and about which little is known, museum experts said.

The scientists suspected that in the area there could have been Dinosaur Skeletons from the herbivorous sauropod family, which measured between 15-20 meters long and had a small head, big feet ,long neck and a powerful tail.

These dinosaurs roamed the Earth at a time when mammals did not yet survive and when the climate and flora were very different from what they are today, the scientists said.

Bessone, a member of the team,said:The expedition, which took place last month, "lasted about 20 days and now we are fully into the stage of studying and investigating the fossils in detail".

During their explorations, financed by German scientific institutes, the researchers found numerous bones, many of them embedded in heavy blocks of stone that still have not been moved from the place they were found, some 1,400 km south of Buenos Aires.

The skeletons are not complete, but it was likely to gather bones from the front and back legs, hips and spine.

The researchers also found "fossils of very primitive flying reptiles" of the pterosaur family that measured more than a meter long and were agile in flight, supported by wings with hollow bones.


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Saturday, January 2, 2010

Scientists: Fossil of Chinese dinosaur genus indicates that some dinosaurs were venomous

Scientists have long known that carnivorous dinosaurs used claws and teeth to kill prey. Now there is evidence that some of them may have used venom, too.

In a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week before Christmas, Chinese and American researchers announced that a fossilized individual from the dinosaur genus Sinornithosaurus had depressions on the side of its face that could have housed poison gland.

The researchers also observed in a fossilized skull a long depression above the dinosaur's teeth that, in their view, may well have delivered venom into a number of long, grooved teeth on the animal's upper jaw.

The teeth would have permitted the dinosaur to grab prey and hold onto it long enough for the venom to take effect.

This structure is commonly found in modern venomous birds and reptiles.

Sinornithosaurus is a genus of the dromaeosauridae, a Family of Dinosaurs that were ancestors of current birds. The dromaeosaurs also included raptor species recognized for a long and sharp claw used to slice open prey.

Animals within the genus would have been about 3 feet long and lived about 125 million years ago in forests within the northeastern region of China.

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Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Add Venom to Arsenal of Dinosaurs on the Hunt

Some dinosaurs, it is identified, were ferocious creatures — using claws, jaws, teeth, horns or even tails to subdue their prey.

But did some make use of poison, too?

A group of paleontologists has found evidence to imply that at least one dinosaur, the birdlike raptor Sinornithosaurus, was venomous. It perhaps used its poison to stun small birds or other prey, the researchers write in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sinornithosaurus, which was about 3 feet long and lived 125 million years ago, was described in 1999 based on fossils discovered at the Liaoning Quarry in northeastern China. The original description noted some unusual features, with grooves in the teeth and a duct running along the base of the teeth.

David A. Burnham of the University of Kansas and Enpu Gong of Northeastern University in Liaoning and colleagues have now interpreted those features, and a cavity in the skull not previously described, as evidence of a venom delivery system similar to that found in some living lizards.

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