The TERRIBLE LIZARD aka Dinosaurs thread

 

Theory of a Deadman - Dinosaur

https://apnews.com/article/spinosaurus-field-museum-chicago-dinosaur-skeleton-display-c1ad0d81b4289c77ba1af72eeb989515
Field Museum debuts Spinosaurus exhibit featuring largest predatory dinosaur
By TERESA CRAWFORD and KATHLEEN FOODY
June 2, 2023
CHICAGO (AP) — The newest addition to the Field Museum on Chicago’s lakefront will give visitors a glimpse of the largest predatory dinosaur yet discovered via a 46-foot (14.02 meter) cast of a Spinosaurus skeleton suspended high above the museum’s main hall.

Field Museum officials unveiled the cast with its distinctive fin and crocodile-like jaws on Friday. It will be available for visitors starting Saturday.

Scientists have long struggled to interpret Spinosaurus fossils to determine the animal’s behavior in life, uncertain whether it swam while hunting or simply waded into water in search of prey. Field Museum researcher Matteo Fabbri said the cast is about 60% of a skeleton, the most complete specimen of the species.

“Spinosaurus is a very weird animal,” Fabbri said. “The proportions of the entire body are incredibly weird in comparison to any other dinosaur. The tail is extremely long, the legs are incredibly short, and the skull reminds (us) of the ones we find in modern crocodiles.”

Fabbri is among a team of researchers who in March published an article concluding that the density of Spinosaurus fossils means they likely did go underwater to hunt. The team compared fossils with other dinosaurs, extinct marine reptiles and living animals including seals and whales — knowing that animals that swim underwater for food have bones that are nearly solid compared to those that remain on land.

The exhibit team at the Field decided to display the Spinosaurus cast with that finding in mind, said Ben Miller, Field Museum exhibition developer.

“We decided to put Spinosaurus in a swimming pose because that’s how it would have spent most of its life,” Miller said. “This is a semiaquatic animal. It would have lived kind of like a crocodile, kind of hanging around in rivers, catching fish.”

According to the museum, a team of artists in Italy created the cast based on fossils found in northern Africa’s Sahara Desert where the Spinosaurus lived nearly 100 million years ago. The original fossils are kept at the Hassan II University of Casablanca in Morocco.

The only other cast of a Spinosaurus is on display in Japan.

The Field Museum’s Spinosaurus cast joins a cast of the plant-eating Titanosaur in its’ main hall, dubbed “Máximo” and already a popular exhibit. That cast measures 122 feet (37.19 meters) across and stands 28 feet tall (8.53 meters) and represents the largest of all dinosaurs researchers have discovered.

Jurassic Park but with a Cat

Scientists say they’re closer to reviving mammoths. What could go wrong?

The plan to bring back the woolly mammoth — or at least a version of it — is ambitious but raises hairy questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/06/scientists-say-theyre-step-closer-reviving-mammoths-what-could-go-wrong/





A company aiming to bring extinct animals back from the dead said it has taken an elephant-sized step toward genetically resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a wild if contentious goal to repopulate the Arctic tundra with a missing titan.

Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company based in Dallas, announced Wednesday it has produced a line of Asian elephant stem cells that can be coaxed to transform into other types of cells needed to reconstruct the extinct giant — or at a least a mammoth-like elephant designed to thrive in the cold.

“It’s probably the most significant thing so far in the project,” said George Church, a Harvard geneticist and Colossal co-founder. “There are many steps in the future.”

For proponents, bringing back vanished animals is a chance to correct humanity’s role in the ongoing extinction crisis. Breakthroughs in their field, they say, may yield benefits for animals still with us, including endangered elephants.

Yet the technical challenges of birthing into the world a living, breathing mammoth remain, well, colossal. And the project raises hairy ethical questions: Who decides what comes back? Where will the reborn species go? Could the money be better spent elsewhere? And how hard will “de-extinction,” as the revival efforts are known, be on the animals themselves?

“The lack of knowledge is the thing that worries me about the welfare of animals,” said Heather Browning, a philosopher at the University of Southampton in England and a former zookeeper.

Can we really bring back the mammoth?

During the last ice age, the woolly mammoth owned the top of the world, plodding across Eurasia and North America and as far south as the modern-day Midwest.

As the creatures died out 4,000 years ago, some carcasses froze over in icy tundra that preserved not only their bones but also their flesh and fur, giving paleontologists the chance to collect DNA fragments. Some mammoth meat was so well kept that at least one adventurous researcher has eaten it.

By 2015, scientists sequenced its genetic blueprint well enough to offer a potential manual for remaking a mammoth. But to test what exactly each of these genes do — which give the beast their curved tusks, fatty build and, of course, thick fur — Church wants elephant stem cells in which he could engineer mammoth DNA and grow tissue samples.

Scientists have produced such stem cells in the lab for other animals, including humans, mice, pigs and even rhinos. But for years, getting the right elephant stem cells to test all those cold-climate characteristics proved elusive, in part because elephant cells’ ability to avoid cancer made reprogramming them difficult.

Colossal said they have produced the stem cells they need by suppressing the anti-cancer genes and bathing the cells in the right chemical cocktail. Colossal published a preprint Wednesday that is not yet peer-reviewed. The company said it is working to place the study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“It hasn’t been straightforward,” said Eriona Hysolli, the company’s head of biological sciences. “It hasn’t been immediately obvious. There were a lot of innovations along the way.”

Jeanne Loring, a researcher at the Scripps Research in California who helped develop potent stem cells for the northern white rhinoceros, said the work showed the elephant researchers’ persistence. “This is an incredibly steep hill they have ahead,” she added. “The challenges get bigger and bigger with the size of the animal.”

Eventually, the company wants to genetically edit a nucleus of a stem cell with mammoth genes and fuse it into an elephant egg. From there, if everything goes according to plan — still a big if — they will implant the embryo in an elephant surrogate and wait for it to give birth.

Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, said all those “ifs” may be insurmountable. There is no guarantee that the modified chromosomes can be introduced to an elephant cell, or if that an embryo will take hold in an elephant womb.

And perhaps more profoundly, there is the question of how a mammoth, if born, will learn to behave like a mammoth. “Most of the mammals and birds that are being talked about have complex social and cultural interactions that have been lost,” Cobb said. “They are not simply their genes.”

Modern elephants, for instance, are highly social beings, passing down knowledge about the location of watering holes and other survival skills from one generation to the next. Their ancient cousins may be similar. “They’ve got no elders to raise them, to teach them,” Browning said. “They’re got no way of learning how to be mammoths.”

And any living surrogate elephant meant to gestate and give birth to a new mammoth will go through some degree of hardship. “How many dead elephants are we willing to have to get one woolly one?” said Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist specializing in ancient elephants at the University of Sheffield in England.

Colossal said its long-term goal is to use artificial wombs to gestate the animals, itself a tall technological task. The company notes that its research into elephant cells can help with current conversation efforts, such as potential treatments for a form of herpes that kills young elephants. Indeed, the company hopes to make money by licensing or selling some of the technologies it creates along the way.

“It’s not so much bringing back the mammoth, it’s saving an endangered species,” Church said. “It’s working out technology that’s useful for conservation and climate change.”

But Cobb said the biggest threats facing elephants are hunting, habitat destruction and other conflicts with humans. “How will a greater understanding of cell biology help?”

One of Colossal’s overarching arguments for bringing back the mammoth is climate change. Scientists at the company say future Arctic herds can stomp down permafrost and prevent more of it from thawing and releasing atmosphere-warming carbon into the air.

“They’re a lot of reasons to restore that environment to what it was,” Church said. “This is the keystone species that’s missing for that.”

Then there is this philosophical question: Is a bioengineered mammoth truly a mammoth? Or is it a furrier elephant that can tolerate the cold?

“It’s a completely new organism that’s being created,” Herridge said. She added that it is still an open question as to what killed off the woolly mammoth: Was it humans overhunting them, or the natural end of the last ice age? If the answer is the latter, then the Arctic may be unsuitable for the resurrected creature, whatever you want to call it.

“I would love to see a mammoth alive,” she said. “I would absolutely love to have a time machine where I could go back to the ice age, and I could see a herd of mammoths being mammoths in the landscape in which they evolved.”

“But all of that has gone.”

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Jurassic Park - That is one big pile of shit




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That is One Big Pile of Shit

JURASSIC WORLD HUNGRY DINOSAURS THE MUSICAL - Animated Song

From fossil dung, scientists reconstruct the rise of the dinosaurs

The research has shed light on the emergence of large dinosaurs and their geographic spread, as well as the role of environmental changes in their evolution.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/11/27/fossil-poop-reveals-dinosaur-rise/




Trackway of a large theropod dinosaur from the early Jurassic in Soltykow, Poland. (Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki)


When paleontologist Martin Qvarnström began peering inside 230-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur dung using an advanced X-ray technology, he wasn’t sure he’d see anything of interest.

But embedded in ancient excrement, he discovered multitudes. Scans revealed tiny beetles with antennas and delicate legs intact, crushed bones from extinct crocodile ancestors, half-digested fish and an abundance of plant life within the bromalites — fossilized feces and vomit — of early dinosaurs and the creatures that roamed alongside them.

From paleontological poop, Qvarnström and colleagues reconstructed the ecology, biology and food webs that wove together the early dinosaur ecosystem in the Polish Basin in central Europe from 230 to 200 million years ago. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, focuses on a critical, but obscure, period in the late Triassic and early Jurassic, when the first dinosaurs appeared in that region and rose to dominance — part of a major turnover in life on Earth.

The picture that emerges from the study of more than 500 bromalites — mostly coprolites, or droppings — is one of a gradual process of change. Small dinosaur ancestors opportunistically took advantage of food sources made more abundant by environmental changes, evolved into larger creatures and widened their ecological niche.

Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, called the deep dive into dino droppings “insightful and innovative,” for putting some of the “most maligned fossils” under scrutiny.

“Academic paleontologists can be prone to toilet humor too,” Brusatte wrote in an email. “But wow, [bromalites] can give us a lot of information. This is exactly what we need to understand the predator and prey links from millions of years ago.”




Excavations in the Late Triassic locality at Lisowice, Poland, one of the studied sites. It yielded a large number of coprolites of predators and herbivores. (Krystian Balanda)


A hidden story in fossilized feces

The celebrities of the paleontological world tend to have giant footprints and outsize bodies — the fearsome apex predators and charismatic herbivores whose skeletons fill museum halls and ignite the imagination.

Fossilized digestive contents, on the other hand, tend to be stored in basements and are often the object of jokes, said Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and the senior author of the study. “Coprolites ... ha ha,” he said, imitating how people sometimes respond when they learn what he studies.

But look close enough, and they can reveal details about how dinosaurs lived — who and what they ate, how they fit into their ecosystems and how that changed over time.

“Inside these coprolites is a story about life and the biology of these early dinosaurs,” Niedźwiedzki said.

The authors used their study to construct a food web, with arrows showing what and who prehistoric creatures were chowing on. When the first dinosaur ancestors came on the scene in present-day Poland some 230 million years ago, they were small, omnivorous and opportunistic silesaurids. The study reveals they filled their stomachs with tiny beetles, among other food.

Carnivorous dinosaurs appeared around 220 million years ago. Herbivorous dinosaurs emerged about 10 million years later. Around 200 million years ago, the plant-eaters may have gained an advantage when the climate became more humid, favoring dinosaurs with a wider palate, who expanded from a mostly conifer diet to consume ferns and other plants that became more abundant.

This dietary flexibility may have helped allow for the emergence of larger dinosaurs. Then, they began to become far more diverse and spread geographically.

“The study shows the subtle interplay of climate, mainly arid, and eventually humid, and how climate mainly affected the dominant plants, which in turn gave opportunities for new herbivores at certain points,” said Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.



Large theropod dinosaur footprint from the early Jurassic site in Poland. (Gerard Gierlinski) (Gerard Gierlinski)


Coprolites from the early Jurassic of Soltykow, Poland. (Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki)

New attention to the dawn of the dinosaurs

While the question of how the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct is a source of wide fascination, the question of how they came to rule in the first place remains remarkably obscure. Did dinosaurs outcompete amphibians, other reptiles and large herbivores due to their physical prowess? Or did environmental changes pave the way for their success?

The new study closely followed the record in one part of the world, and a similar approach could now be used in other regions, to discern if the food webs were similar and identify differences in how dinosaurs rose to dominance.

The new study favors the idea that dinosaurs were well-suited to take advantage of changes in the prehistoric environment, but also reveal that the age of the dinosaurs had a slow, complicated start.

“Dinosaurs did not simply sweep across ancient Poland and the rest of the world soon after they originated, like a marauding army,” Brusatte said. “It took them time, and patience, and a lot of adaptation, all while being affected by the evolutionary whims of the other organisms in their food webs.”


whats brown and sounds like a bell?

Ancient DNA sheds light on how dogs and humans bonded in Americas

What a salmon diet tells us about how dogs formed close bonds with humans 12,000 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/12/04/ancient-dogs-americas-dna-bond/


When archaeologists discovered the shin bone of a 12,000-year-old creature from Swan Point in the Alaskan interior, they were eager to use ancient DNA analysis to learn what they had discovered. A wolf? Or could this be one of the oldest dogs yet discovered in the Americas?

Deeper study raised more questions than it answered. The Swan Point canid — the group that includes wolves, coyotes and dogs — didn’t resemble any known dog genetically. But it ate like a dog.

A chemical analysis of the bone revealed that the Swan Point canid scarfed down a diet heavy in salmon, in stark contrast to other ancient wolves from the same region that ate a terrestrial diet — evidence, the authors argue in the journal Science Advances, of the antiquity of the human-dog bond during the early peopling of the Americas.

“It’s not related to the dog populations that we know,” said François Lanoë, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Arizona. “Behaviorally, it probably behaved like a dog. Even if it was a wolf, it was a tamed wolf, which is you can think of it as a preliminary stage of domestication because it was most likely fed by people directly.”

How and when wolves became humans’ companions and partners — hunters, guards, “dogs” — remains a controversial and mysterious topic in science. The study published Wednesday won’t settle the question. Instead, it adds a trove of data on ancient dogs’ and wolves’ DNA and diet that will help scientists trying to piece together more about the complicated relationship between humans and canids.

“It is very interesting, but perhaps not surprising, if there existed some kind of experimentation early on in dog domestication, at the end of the Pleistocene, where people were living with and feeding wild canids,” Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo not involved in the study, wrote in an email. “Some of these canids may have been kept as pets and bred and left a genetic legacy in later dog lineages, while others represented fleeting relationships and left no genetic trace. Dog domestication was a messy process, and this study adds a new piece to the puzzle!”

The origins of man’s best friend
Dogs were the first domesticated animal. But where and when wolves turned into man’s best friend remains controversial — somewhere in Eurasia, probably somewhere around 20,000 years ago, though it depends which expert you ask and the estimates span a wide range. Dogs have long been presumed to have been part of the equally scientifically contentious story of the peopling of the Americas, though it’s not clear the first people to migrate into the Americas brought dogs with them.

There are many gaps in that archaeological record. There have been 9,900-year-old dog remains found in present-day Illinois, a 10,000-year-old fragment of a bone in Alaska and 13,100-year-old remains discovered in a cave in coastal British Columbia. The study published Wednesday draws on new and old specimens to compile an exhaustive database of 76 ancient canids from Alaska, including dogs, coyotes and wolves. The Swan Point specimen is one of them, along with an 8,100-year-old jawbone from a wolflike creature that also fed heavily on salmon. These finds underscore that “dog domestication” is a tidy label for a relationship that was less straightforward than the name suggests.

Wolves evolved into dogs, with changes in how their bodies are built — shorter snouts, for example — and in their genetics. But focusing solely on changes in DNA and bones, which occur over a long time frame, may miss out on the behaviors in between that help produce those changes, the scientists argue.

“Just looking at genetics and domestication kind of fails to see that intermingling part, where you have individuals interacting with canids. And that’s a relationship that we kind of want to get at,” said Joshua Reuther, an archaeologist with the University of Alaska Museum of the North and one of the authors of the paper.

What is a dog?

The authors argue that while they can’t classify the Swan Point canid as a dog, they have found a creature that was in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans. But that assertion, like nearly everything in the scientific debate about dog domestication, won’t convince everyone.

The wolf may have simply been eating salmon naturally, without human help, said Mikkel Sinding, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

“It is a wolf that ate like later dogs. There are several possible explanations,” Sinding wrote in an email. “Yes, humans could have fed it, but it could also just naturally have had this diet.”

If people were feeding it, it is impossible to know the nature of its relationship to humans — was it tame? Was it a companion? But the study puts forward a wealth of information on the ancestry and diet of ancient canids, which could help researchers trying to untangle the puzzle of people’s long-standing relationship with these wolflike, doglike creatures that may have been part of human life.

“Indigenous peoples throughout North America highly value canids, and wolves often take a really huge part — they feature prominently in origin stories,” said Audrey Lin, a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History. “Any study that addresses this deep relationship between humans and wolves and the deep respect that they have for wolves is really cool.”