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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Dinosaur DNA rebuilt from ancient eggs

Jurassic Park has just taken a giant T-Rex-sized step toward becoming reality after ancient DNA from long-extinct creatures was effectively extracted.

The DNA was taken from creatures such as the 10ft, half tonne elephant bird and effectively extracted from pieces of eggshell, trapped in Fossils for thousands of years.

The innovative technique `has major implications in the fields of archaeology, palaeontology, conservation and forensics', said Australian biologists. 'We got DNA signatures from a variety of fossil eggshells, including the extinct moa, elephant birds and a 19,000-year-old emu,' said Murdoch University's Charlotte Oskam.
The researchers utilized lasers to highlight DNA `hotspots' under a microscope, marking them with fluorescent green dye. 'We demonstrated that genetic material is preserved in the eggshell matrix and have successfully imaged the DNA via microscopy,' they said.

Their study, to be published this week, is the first to determine the way to tease out genetic strands from eggshells.

Bird eggs are resilient and act as a barrier to oxygen and water - the key reason of DNA damage.

Modern shells have antimicrobial chemicals and it is possible these remain active in fossil shells, also helping to protect the significant genetic code.

`Biomolecules preserved in fossil eggshell are a formerly untapped source of DNA,' said Ms Oskam.

`But even inserting particular genes into living species does not bring an extinct species back to life. And personally I believe it is unethical to recreate a species that is extinct,' she concluded.

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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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Dinosaurs strike roof at the Mount

To sight Dinosaur Footprints, all you have to do is look up.

And now a staircase and viewing platform has been constructed at the Fireclay Caverns in Mount Morgan, tourists can get an even better view of the best examples of early Jurassic Dinosaur footprints in existence.

As an integral part of the Mount Morgan Town and Mine tour, run by TMC Tours, the Fireclay Caverns have fascinated locals and visitors similar for years.

But given the height of the ceiling, the infrastructure improvement was required.

Mount Morgan Promotion and Development (MMPAD) president, Mr. John Steinberger said the new platform would complement the fantastic Dinosaur Fossil display at the Mount Morgan Mine Administration building and present a richer, more immersive experience for all.

“The younger ones who are all dinosaur mad are going to like this,” Mr. Steinberger said.

Created by Mount Morgan Miners in the late 1800s as they excavated a rich clay deposit for firebricks to employ in the mines furnaces, the Fireclay Caverns are one of the largest man-made caverns in Australia.

Labels: Dinosaur fossil pictures, Dinosaurs research, Real Dinosaur picture, Walking with Dinosaurs

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".

Labels: Dinosaur bones, Dinosaur picture, Dinosaurs games, New Dinosaurs

Friday, March 5, 2010

Dog-sized creature was almost a dinosaur

Dino-like animal was tiny, weighing about that of a young child

A four-legged animal about the size of a large dog with a long tail is now the oldest known relative of Dinosaurs, dating back few 240 million years.

Paleontologists recently examined the bones from at least 14 individuals of this proto-dinosaur that were found out in southern Tanzania.

The dino-like animal was small, weighing about that of a young child, and possiblely munched on plants.

Until now, the Fossil record proposes that the oldest known dinosaurs went back just 230 million years. But the new finding, tells scientists dinosaurs were around much earlier and their lineage had already split off from a group of dinosaur-like relatives by about 240 million years before.

From the various bones of the species now called Asilisaurus kongwe, Sterling Nesbitt, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues pieced together a nearly whole skeleton of the animal.

The researchers believe the dinosaur relative was about 3 to 10 feet long (1 to 2 meters) from nose to tail and about 3 feet (1 meter) tall from head to toes, Nesbitt said. The animal weighed in the neighborhood of 10 to 30 kg.

It walked on all fours and sported an upturned beak possibly enveloped in a horny substance and peg-like teeth tipped with tiny serrations.

Labels: Dinosaur animals, Dinosaur fossil pictures, Dinosaur reptile, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs research

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Dinosaurs had wrists like birds

The flexible wrists of birds that let them fold their wings have now been seen in Dinosaurs well before flight, scientists discover.

Dinosaurs such as Velociraptor might have partly folded their feathered arms to guard such plumage from harm's way, researchers explained. The wrists and the feathers in the lineage that direct to birds then became more extreme, laying the groundwork for flight, they added.

Although birds are most known for their feathers, wings and toothless beaks, another distinctive feature is a wrist joint that is very flexible, although only in one direction.

A bird can bend its wrist to the point where the side of the hand where the little finger would be can lie closely along the forearm, so any fingertips would point back almost towards the elbow, but the wrist cannot bend in the opposite direction, nor even fully straighten.

This unique joint allows a bird to fold the wing when at rest, and to partly fold the wing during the upstroke in flight, greatly improving the efficiency of their flight.

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