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14 Unusual Prehistoric Creatures

Friday, December 23, 2016

There are plenty of strange animals living today, but few people know how odd some of the creatures of the past were. Here is a list of fifteen such creatures, ranging from dinosaurs to various other reptiles and fish. All are unseen by modern man (except in the form of fossils) and all are bizarre. In no particular order.

Deinotherium

Deinotherium

This genus of elephant-like creatures was not only huge, but they also had a pair of chin tusks. These odd tusks might have been used to dig up the soil to gain access to roots and vegetables. They also had a relatively short trunk compared to other Proboscideans. They ranged from 12-15 feet high, making them one of the largest mammals to ever walk on the earth.

Therizinosauridaes

Therizinosauridae

This family of strange, mysterious theropods was notable for their long necks and their large claws. However, unlike most other theropods, they were herbivores (or at least primarily). Some of them may have had feathers. The genus that the family is named after, Therizinosaurus, is actually only known from a few fossils, but its claws were quite large, likely reaching a meter in length.

Epidexipteryx

Epidexipteryx

This bird-like dinosaur reveals an interesting part about the evolutionary history of birds. This member of the Scansoriopterygidae (“climbing wings”) had no flight feathers, but it did have four long tail feathers. These feathers were likely used in displays. Due to its age (It lived in China around 152 to 168 million years ago), it provides evidence that feathers evolved several million years before flight did (not surprisingly). It was also one of the smallest dinosaurs, reaching just 10 inches in height as an adult (not counting its feathers). That’s the size of a pigeon.

Epidendrosaurus

Epidendrosaurus

Another bird-like dinosaur, this one belonged in the same family as Epidexipteryx. It is currently the earliest dinosaur known to have adapted for life in the trees, an important moment in the evolution of birds. More bizarrely, this dinosaur had an oddly long third finger, twice the length of the other ones. They may have been used to dig for insects.

Microraptor

One Species of Microraptor Had Black Feathers

Yet another bird-like dinosaur, this dinosaur had four wings (and a feathered tail), although it could not fly. Instead, it likely glided from place to place, kind of like a flying squirrel. It is likely that this creature is one of the most recent common ancestors between birds and dinosaurs, its gliding ability eventually evolving into flight. Unfortunately for the genus, one fossil was used in a forgery, along with a fossil of a primitive bird, Yanornis, to create a fake fossil that was said to be the ultimate missing link between birds and dinosaurs: Archeoraptor. Although it could have been caught before the public noticed, it was published in National Geographic before it could be peer reviewed. When it was exposed for the fraud it was quite embarrassing to the scientific community. There are two species of Microraptor.

Longisquama

A pair of small Longisquama in the branches of a Triassic tree.

Living during the Triassic, Longisquama was a small, lizard like creature that appears to have had a series of long feathers on its back. This implies that birds might have not evolved from theropods, but lizard-like reptiles instead. Of course, things are not always what they seem. Some scientists think they are just specially modified scales. Others think that the fossil’s form is an optical illusion: that the feathers are just fern fronds. Due to the large amount of feathered dinosaur fossils, it seems that these two possibilities are more accurate.

Tanystropheus

Tanystropheus by PaleoGuy

When I describe a long necked reptile, most people think of sauropods or even plesiosaurs. This Triassic reptile was neither of these. This reptile was 20 feet long, yet had a 10 foot long neck! Evidence indicates that this was a fish-eating reptile, since fossils of it have been found in mainly partially aquatic fossil sites and fish scales and Cephalopod tentacles have been found in their stomachs. They might have stayed on the beach, using their long necks to help them devour fish from the sea. It is also thought to have been at least semi-aquatic.

Sharovipteryx

Life reconstruction of Sharovipteryx mirabilis by Dmitry Bogdanov

Another gliding reptile, this Triassic critter glided similarly to Microraptor. However, Sharovipteryx had two “wings” on its hind legs and two small “wings” on its front legs. It might have used its wings while jumping from place to place on the ground. Some scientists think it was related to Pterosaurs, but its reversal of wings to its legs instead of arms questions this.

Nyctosaurus

Nyctosaurus by HaughtyFlaki

This genus of pterosaurs is the only one that does not have claws on its wings. Otherwise, most species looked quite average, similar to the famous Pterodon… until a new, currently unnamed species was discovered in 2003. The species had a huge, antler-like crest, larger than any other pterosaurs crest. Some speculated that there was a flap of tissue in between these antlers, like some other pterosaurs, which could have been used like a sail to enhance its flight. However, research shows that a crest that large would actually impair its flight, so it likely just had an odd set of antlers.

Pterodaustro

Pterodaustro

This pterosaur had an unusual set of teeth, similar to the baleen of some whales. It almost certainly used these teeth to eat small, aquatic organisms, similar to the way a flamingo eats brine shrimp. Since flamingos get their pinkish hue from their diet, Pterodaustro might have been pinkish too.

Dunkleosteus

Dunkleosteus by NTamura on Deviantart

One of the scariest creatures ever to live in the ocean, this Devonian fish could grow up to 33 feet long, had an armored face, and likely had one of the strongest bites in history! It used a beak-like mouth instead of teeth to devourer its prey. It was one of the largest of the Placoderms, a group of armored fish that are now extinct.

Stethacanthus

CGTPL Stethacanthus

Sharks have lasted for over 400 million years. Although they have remained relatively unchanged throughout the fossil record, there are definitely some odd balls. This particular shark had an anvil-shaped dorsal fin, with small spikes on it, as well as having a very bizarre growth on its head. The fin could have been used for courtship or for defense.

Helicoprion

Helicoprion by SharkeyTrike

This bizarre fossil was originally thought to be an ammonite, as the fossil looked like a spiraling, circular shell. However, after some examination, it was revealed that is wasn’t a shell, but a spiraling set of shark teeth, a “tooth whirl”. Unfortunately, due to a lack of a body (cartilage does not fossilize as well as bone), so a guessing game began. It was guessed to be on the shark’s dorsal fin, tail, or even its snout. Thankfully, a skull of a related shark, Ornithoprion, was found to have a tooth-whirl on its lower jaw. The tooth whirl likely contained all of the shark’s teeth that it would use in its life: its older teeth would be moved away to make room for its newer, better teeth. This does not solve the problem yet, however! The tooth whirl was then placed on the tip of the lower jaw but it turns out that that would actually slow down the shark! Perhaps the most accurate representation is one where the tooth whirl existed deep in its mouth instead.

Deinocheirus

Deinocheirus mirificus restoration. Based on the skeletal diagram and description in Lee et al. (2014).

The only fossil of this dinosaur is a pair of arms. These arms look like they belonged to an ornithomimid but they were 8 feet long. This means that either Deinocheirus towered over the rest of the ornithomimids (and most theropods, since, regarding proportions, it would have been 40 feet long!) or it simply had very long arms for its body. The use of its arms is debated: some say it used them to tear apart large dinosaurs, others say that the claws were too blunt, so they were used as defensive weapons. Some have even said that Deinocheirus used its huge arms to climb trees, although this hypothesis is widely disregarded. Once again, the lack of a body leaves many questions unanswered.

Source: www.listverse.com

Hadrosaurids

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Family tree of the Hadrosauroidea. Representative genera of each tribe are shown to scale

Hadrosaurids, or duck-billed dinosaurs, are members of the ornithischian family Hadrosauridae. This group is also known as the duck-billed dinosaurs, for the flat, duck-bill appearance of the bones in their snouts. The family, which includes ornithopods such as Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus, was a common herbivore in the Upper Cretaceous Period of what is now Asia, Europe, Antarctica, South America, and North America. Hadrosaurids are descendants of the Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaurs and had a similar body layout. Like the rest of the ornithischians, these animals had a predentary bone and a pubic bone which was positioned backwards in the pelvis. Hadrosaurids are divided into two principal subfamilies: the lambeosaurines (Lambeosaurinae), which had hollow cranial crests or tubes, and the saurolophines, identified as hadrosaurines in most pre-2010 works (Saurolophinae or Hadrosaurinae), which lacked hollow cranial crests (solid crests were present in some forms). Saurolophines tended to be bulkier than lambeosaurines. Lambeosaurines are divided into aralosaurines, lambeosaurines, parasaurolophines, and tsintaosaurines, while saurolophines include saurolophus, brachylophosaurines, and kritosaurines.

North American Hadrosaurs by PaleoGuy

Hadrosaurs had a stiff tail that was probably used for balance. They had hoof-like nails on their feet, and bumpy skin. They ran on two legs, holding their tail and head in a horizontal position. They may have walked on all four legs while grazing. Hadrosaurs probably lived near bodies of water, migrating to high ground to lay eggs. It used to be thought that they had webbed hands, but this was an artifact of the fossilization process.

The two major divisions of hadrosaurids are differentiated by their cranial ornamentation. While members of the Lambeosaurinae subfamily have hollow crests that differ depending on species, members of the Saurolophinae (Hadrosaurinae) subfamily have solid crests or none at all. Lambeosaurine crests had air chambers that may have produced a distinct sound and meant that their crests could have been used for both an audio and visual display.

Edmontosaurus skull, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Photo by Ballista

Hadrosaurs are closely related to the Iguanodontids, and are probably their descendants. Hadrosaurs were Ornithischians (the order of bird-hipped dinosaurs) and Ornithopods (“bird-footed” herbivores with hoof-like feet). Hadrosaurs are divided into two groups, the Hadrodsaurinae (non-crested hadrosaurs) and the Lambeosaurinae (hadrosaurs that had skull crests that connected with their nasal passages).

Hadrosaurs lived during the late Cretaceous period. Their fossils have been found in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Although it has been long believed that hadrosaurs originated in Asia, the new find, Protohadros byrdi, seems to shift the birthplace of hadrosaurs to North America. Protohadros byrdi dates from 95.5 million years ago, was recently found in Texas, USA.

The following taxonomy includes dinosaurs currently referred to the Hadrosauridae and its subfamilies. Hadrosaurids that were accepted as valid, but not placed in a cladogram at the time of Prieto-Márquez’s 2010 study, are included at the highest level to which they were placed (either then, or in their description if they postdate the papers used here).

  • Family Hadrosauridae

    • Subfamily Hadrosaurinae

    • Subfamily Saurolophinae

    • Subfamily Lambeosaurinae

    • Dubious hadrosaurids

      • Arstanosaurus

      • Cionodon

      • Diclonius

      • Dysganus

      • Mandschurosaurus

      • Microhadrosaurus

      • Orthomerus

      • Pteropelyx

      • Thespesius

      • Trachodon

Source: www.wikipedia.org

Olorotitan

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Olorotitan

Olorotitan was a genus of lambeosaurine duckbilled dinosaur from the middle or latest Maastrichtian-age Late Cretaceous, whose remains were found in the Tsagayan Formation beds of Kundur, Amur Region, Far Eastern Russia. The type, and only species is Olorotitan arharensis whose holotype specimen, consisting of a nearly complete skeleton, was described by Pascal Godefroit et al. in mid-2003. The generic name Olorotitan means “gigantic swan”, while the specific descriptor arharensis refers to the location of the fossil find at Arhara County. Olorotitan is distinct from other crested duckbills by its possession of an unusual crest that points backward and takes on a hatchet or fan-like shape. Its discovery has implications for the diversity of lambeosaurine hadrosaurids.

Olorotitan at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium. Photo by Paul Hermans.

Hadrosaurs have a long association with North America,‭ ‬but they are known from other areas like Asia where they are usually‭ ‬represented by incomplete remains.‭ ‬Olorotitan however was almost complete and became widespread through palaeontology circles as the most complete lambeosaurine hadrosaurid outside of North America.‭ ‬With eighteen vertebrae Olorotitan is also remarkable for having a very long neck for a hadrosaurid,‭ ‬and it was this neck length that was the inspiration for its name which means‭ ‘‬giant swan‭’‬.‭
Olorotitan arharensis is based on the most complete lambeosaurine skeleton found outside North America to date. It was a large hadrosaurid, comparable to other large lambeosaurines like Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus, and may have grown up to 8 meters (26 feet) long.‭

As a hadrosaurid, Olorotitan would have been a bipedal/quadrupedal herbivore, eating plants with a sophisticated skull that permitted a grinding motion analogous to chewing, and was furnished with hundreds of continually-replaced teeth. Its tall, broad hollow crest, formed out of expanded skull bones containing the nasal passages, probably functioned in identification by sight and sound.

The fact that Olorotitan exists in Asia at a time when other lambeosaurine hadrosaurids seem to have disappeared from North America suggests that the two continents were climatically different to one another,‭ ‬with a Asia having a more suitable habitat for lambeosaurines.‭ ‬A climatic difference could also explain why fossils of sauropods are also known from some areas of Asia long after they disappeared in North America.

‘Jurassic Park’ Flashback: Behind-the-Scenes Photos From the 1993

Monday, December 19, 2016

‘Jurassic Park’ Flashback: Behind-the-Scenes Photos From the 1993

Take a look back at the movie that started it all: 1993’s ‘Jurassic Park.’ Steven Spielberg’s classic about test-tube dinosaurs on the rampage in a jungle theme park was a landmark in computer-generated visual effects and still remains one of the best action-adventure movies of all time.

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Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Steven Spielberg
Neill and Dern play the intrepid paleontologists Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler, whose tour of Jurassic Park goes catastrophically awry.

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Joseph Mazzello and Steven Spielberg
Spielberg works with Joseph Mazzello, who plays Tim, one of park creator John Hammond’s grandchildren. “Steven wrote me a recommendation for USC to go to film school. Believe it or not, I got in,” the grown-up actor told People in 2013. “He’s been there for me throughout my life whenever I really needed him.”

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg during the filming of ‘Jurassic Park.’ “My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make ‘Jurassic Park,’ Spielberg once said.

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg poses between a pair of giant dinosaur feet in a publicity still. The director thought the movie’s fearsome T. rex was “the star of the movie.”

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg wears a dino-appropriate T-shirt during the shoot.

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg poses with a Triceratops puppet.

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg on set. Last year, Dern described how the director would roar into a megaphone so the actors would know where to look during a scene.

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Richard Attenborough and Steven Spielberg
The late Richard Attenborough — who played park guru John Hammond — with Spielberg. A statue of Hammond is in the visitor’s center of the new park in ‘Jurassic World.’

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Jeff Goldblum, Steven Spielberg and Laura Dern
Jeff Goldblum, who plays mathematician Ian Malcolm, with Spielberg and Dern. In 2013, Dern told ‘Vanity Fair,’ “Not a week goes by that I’m not approached by someone about ‘Jurassic Park.’ That’s just something that people to love to talk about and continue to discover.”

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Steven Spielberg
Spielberg and team work on the scene with the sick Triceratops. At least seven puppeteers were required to operate the puppet.

Why Were There So Many Dinosaur Species?

Monday, December 19, 2016

Dinosaurs by Durbet on DeviantArt

A new species of dinosaur is described, on average, every ten days. As many as 31 species have already been reported this year and we can expect a few more before 2016 is over. Of course, figuring out what counts as a distinct species is a tricky problem. Paleontologists are argumentative by nature, so getting any two of them to agree on a definitive list of species is probably impossible. But by anyone’s count, there were a lot of them – 700 or 800 that we know of, probably thousands in total. So how did the dinosaurs become so diverse?

So many fossils. Shutterstock

First we need an idea of just how many dinosaur species there were. One study tried to estimate the total diversity of dinosaurs by using the species-area effect – the idea being that if we know how many species one small part of the Earth can support, we can extrapolate how many must have existed worldwide. These calculations suggest that at the end of the Mesozoic, 66m years ago, the standing diversity of dinosaurs – all the species alive at one point in time – was between 600 and 1,000 species.

This seems to be a reasonable estimate, in that if you counted up all of the living land mammals weighing more than 1kg (the size of the smallest dinosaurs) and then added the extinct species from the past 50,000 years, such as wooly mammoths, ground sloths, and giant kangaroos (correcting for losses to diversity caused by humans) you would end up with a similar figure.

However, this is just the number of species around at one point in time, and the dinosaurs were around for a very, very long time. Over the course of the Mesozoic, dinosaurs constantly evolved and went extinct. Doing some quick and rough estimates, and assuming 1,000 species of dinosaurs lived at any one time, and then that the species turned over every million years – that’s 160 times over the 160m-year reign of the dinosaurs – we end up with 160,000 species. Which is a lot of dinosaurs.

This is, of course, a very rough estimate. It depends on a lot of assumptions, such as how many different species the planet can support, and how quickly they evolve and go extinct. If we assume a lower standing diversity of 500 species and slower turnover, with species lasting 2m years, for example, we end up with around 50,000 species. On the other hand, perhaps standing diversity of 2,000 species is reasonable for the warm, lush, Mesozoic, and perhaps they only lasted just half a million years. That gives us over 500,000 species. So it seems reasonable to guess that there were between 50,000 and 500,000 species of dinosaurs – without including Mesozoic birds, which might double the diversity.

Why so many species, then? It comes down to three things. Dinosaurs were good at specialization, localisation, and speciation.

Specialisation

Dinosaurs were specialists, and by specializing to exploit different niches, different species could coexist without competing. In western North America, the giant predator T. rex coexisted with little meat-eating dromaeosaurs. Enormous, long-necked sauropods browsed alongside horned ceratopsians, which grazed on ferns and flowers. There were smaller plant-eaters – pachycephalosaurs and ornithomimids – as well as heron-like fish eaters, and even anteater-like insectivores.

And within these niches, there was further specialization. T. rex was large and had massive jaws but fairly stocky limbs, and was well-suited to preying on the slow-moving but heavily armed TriceratopsT. rex‘s cousin, Nanotyrannus, was smaller but had the lanky legs of a marathon runner, and probably chased down faster prey. This specialization meant that – based on my recent studies of the fauna – as many as 25 dinosaurs could live side-by-side in one habitat.

Localisation

Localisation refers to how different places had different dinosaur species. Mongolia had one set of animals – tyrannosaurs, duckbills, and ostrich dinosaurs – inhabiting a lush delta that flowed through the middle of a desert. Just a few miles away, little horned dinosaurs and parrot-headed oviraptors inhabited the dune fields. Dinosaurs also show differences across continents, with different species inhabiting different parts of North America, for example. Between continents, the differences are even more extreme. During the Late Cretaceous, North America and Asia were dominated by tyrannosaurs, duckbilled dinosaurs, and horned dinosaurs. But Africa and South America, cut off by oceans for tens of millions of years, had an entirely different set of species. Instead of tyrannosaurs, the horned abelisaurs were top predators. Instead of duckbills, the long-necked titanosaurs were the dominant plant eaters.

Speciation

Dinosaurs evolved new species with remarkable speed. Radioactive dating has made it possible to date the rocks containing dinosaur fossils, and from that, to estimate how long dinosaur species lasted. The rocks forming the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, for example, were deposited over a period of around 2m years. At the bottom of these strata, we have one species- Triceratops horridus, and at the top, we have a second Triceratops prorsus evolving from the first.

This implies that a species lasts a million years or less – a short time, at least in geological terms. Studies of other formations, and other horned dinosaurs, tend to suggest that other species were similarly short-lived. In the badlands of Dinosaur Park in Canada, we can find fossils that show three different sets of dinosaur – the first replaced by the second, the second by the third – evolving in 2m years. Dinosaurs evolved rapidly, driven by shifts in the planet’s seas, climates, and continents, and also the evolution of other dinosaurs. And if they didn’t, they went extinct.

We’ll never know exactly how many dinosaurs existed. It’s so rare for an animal to fossilize and be preserved that many tens of thousands of species, maybe hundreds of thousands, are probably lost to us forever. And yet the remarkable thing is that the pace of dinosaur discovery has actually increased over the years. Most of the species that have ever lived are lost, but we have thousands left to find.

Source: www.theconversation.com

10 Mistakes In Jurassic World That Ruined The Movie

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Jurassic World (2015)

In 1990, Michael Crichton wrote a book about a fictional island where dinosaurs were being bred to be part of an exclusive theme park/zoo. Jurassic Park was born, and three years later Steven Spielberg gave the world one of the most iconic films of all time. Jurassic Park hit the big screen in 1993 to critical and audience acclaim. The film told the story of two scientists, Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler, who are transported to the mysterious island as part of a preview tour to give their expert approval. Whilst there, with a team of other specialists, the park faces a huge power failure and the team find themselves fighting for their lives against animals that are not of this time.

Since then, two sequels have been produced: Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997) and Jurassic Park 3 (2001). In 2015, a fourth installment was released, much to the excitement of the fans of the original film. Jurassic World glossed over the two sequels and jumped to the present day where the original Jurassic Park has grown into a multi-million visitors-a-year theme park. When two young boys are sent there by their mother to visit with their Aunt, who holds a high level managerial role within the park, it doesn’t go quite to plan. As with the first film, things go haywire and people end up in deathly danger.

However, there are a number of goofs throughout the film that distract slightly from the giant lizard-based drama. Here we look at 10 of these goofs that you may have missed. You won’t watch the film the same way again.

10. Original Jurassic Park Jeep’s Tires As Good As New

When Gray and Zach stumble upon a hut when they are trying to evade the Idominus Rex, they stumble upon two of the original Jeeps from Jurassic Park. The use of the original Jeeps in Jurassic world is a fantastic nod to the original film, however in reality the tires would have disintegrated by now, and the tires that are used are the modern update of the original tires used in Jurassic Park. Maybe one of the dinosaurs evolved into a mechanic?

9. Running In High Heels In A Jungle?

There has been uproar about the fact that Claire remained in high heels throughout the film, running through jungle and managing to outrun a T-Rex in nude stiletto’s. Whilst this has caused feminists and gender politicians to have a small fit, did anybody notice that she did change her shoes? In the early scenes, her ‘ridiculous shoes’ are commented on and captured on screen with purpose, yet in subsequent scenes it can be easily seen that she is wearing lace up nude flat shoes. The shoes also transfer from dirty to clean when she enters the T-Rex pen and then back to dirty again once she has finished leading the T-Rex to the Indominous Rex.

8. Magical Mud

When Claire’s nephews Gray and Zach are being chased by the Indominus Rex, they are forced to jump off a waterfall in order to escape the giant lizard hell bent on eating them. They then jump into the water below, and when they emerge Gray has mud on his face. This mud magically disappears and then reappears in between shots.

7. The Intensely Stable Rifle

In the scene where Claire and Owen are hiding from the Indominus Rex by the abandoned Jeep, Owen leaves his rifle perched against the side of the Jeep. We then see the Indominus Rex use his head and upper body to rock the Jeep, yet when Owen moves back around the vehicle once the dinosaur has left, the rifle is unmoved. But it’s highly unlikely given the force that the dinosaur was moving the vehicle, and the fact the dinosaur was hitting the vehicle on the same side that the rifle was perched on.

6. Cell Phone Switches To Vibrate Automatically

When Zach and Gray are in the glass gyrosphere that transports them around the safari style section of the park, Claire calls to warn them of the dangers that are occurring in the park. The phone can clearly be heard ringing. Yet after they are caught up in a fight between the Indominus Rex and another dinosaur and consequently flipped upside down, a setting on the phone is somehow -without human control – switched to the vibrate setting, which is what attracts the dinosaur to them.

5. Transforming Buildings

In the original Jurassic Park film, the visitor’s center is grand, with a tall staircase and other architectural features that are missing when Zach and Gray supposedly stumble upon the original visitor’s center in Jurassic World.

4. Night Goggles Still Work After 22 Years!

When Gray discovers the heavy and expensive night goggles that are used in the original Jurassic Park film, they turn on. Having just laid there on a humid Costa Rican island for 22 years, the power would have drained from the batteries.

3. Continuity Not On Point

Geography may not be the strongest aspect of this film, in terms of Jurassic World’s continuity with the original film, Jurassic Park. In the original classic, the visitor’s centre is not positioned anywhere near the restricted area as it is positioned in the West. Yet in Jurassic World, the visitor’s centre is positioned in the East.

2. The Adhoc Passing Of Time

Day time seems to pass quickly on the island. When the visitors are running scared from the Pteranodons in the main park area, like a prehistoric scene from The Birds by Hitchcock, it is broad daylight. In the next scene where we join the team in the raptor enclosure, it is pitch black, yet no time appears to have passed. Earlier on in the movie, Hoskins is speaking to Owen and Barry following Owens training session with the Velociraptors. During the conversation, the sun changes from midday to early morning.

1. Mystical Scratches

When the camera points out into the Indominus Rex enclosure from inside the building, there are originally no scratches to be seen on the glass, however when Mr. Masrani is taken into the enclosure scratches are evident on the glass. It’s a blatant error as the Indominus Rex had not been in the enclosure since the scene Mr. Masrani was in there at the time.

Sources: www.moviemistakes.com

Human Origin Traced to Worm Which Swam 0.5 Billion Years Ago

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Pikaia

Paleontologists claim to have tracked the origins of humans and other vertebrates to a worm that swam in today’s Canada. The team concluded that the extinct Pikaia gracilens is the most primitive known member of the chordate family.

The chordate family includes fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals – pretty much all of what we consider to be ‘evolved’ life, so tracing its origins would be quite a big deal. This is why Simon Conway Morris of the Cambridge University went to Canada to analyze fossils from the Canadian Rockies.

His findings were published in the British scientific journal Biological Reviews; he identified a notochord or rod that would become part of the backbone in vertebrates, and skeletal muscle tissue called myomeres in 114 fossil specimens of the creature, as well as a vascular system.

Scale diagram of various Burgess Shale invertebrates, P. gracilens in yellow. Author: Matt Martyniuk (Dinoguy2)

“The discovery of myomeres is the smoking gun that we have long been seeking,” said the study’s lead author, Simon Conway Morris of the Cambridge University. “Now with myomeres, a nerve chord, a notochord and a vascular system all identified, this study clearly places Pikaia as the planet’s most primitive chordate. “So, next time we put the family photograph on the mantle-piece, there in the background will be Pikaia.”

The first members of Pikaia were discovered in 1911, but back then the animals were dismissed as ancestors of worms or eels, and it wasn’t until 1970 that Morris suggested the five-centimeter sideways flattened animal could be our ancestor.

“In particular, it was our use of an electron microscope that allowed us to see very fine details of its anatomy,” Jean-Bernard Caron, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and the study’s co-author, told AFP.

Finding out that all the animal diversity we see today can be traced to this simple animal puts a lot of things into perspective, and, as Caron says, it’s really humbling.

“It’s very humbling to know that swans, snakes, bears, zebras and, incredibly, humans all share a deep history with this tiny creature no longer than my thumb,” he said.

Via www.Physorg.com

Spinosaurus: Larger Than T. rex Was a Great Swimmer, Ate Sharks

Friday, December 16, 2016

Spinosaurus. Image: National Geographic

Spinosaurus aegyptiacus enjoyed surf with its turf since a new study has found this dino was a skillful swimmer that ate sharks and other marine life, sported an eye-catching sail, and was the biggest carnivorous dinosaur ever known.

The 44,000-pound 50-foot-long beast, described in the latest issue of the journal Science, measured more than 9 feet longer than the world’s largest documented T. rex specimen.

Spinosaurus’ size and big teeth alone would have drawn attention to the dinosaur during its lifetime 95 million years ago. The Cretaceous dino’s large, and possibly multicolored, sail added yet another dramatic feature to its presence.

“The sail must have played an important function—after all, this is a very, very big thing to carry around on your back!” lead author Nizar Ibrahim told Discovery News. “We think that the sail served as a display structure, as it would stick out of the water even when the dinosaur was swimming at the surface, with most of its body submerged.”

“The sail would tell other dinosaurs, and especially other Spinosaurus, a lot about the size of the animal, and may have conveyed other information, such as gender, but we don’t know that for sure,” continued Ibrahim, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. “Dinosaurs had pretty good eyesight, so it is quite likely that many were brightly colored. The sail of Spinosaurus is a great ‘canvas,’ so I would expect it to be multicolored.”

The huge dinosaur was first discovered in the Egyptian Sahara more than a century ago by German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach. The remains were brought to Munich’s state paleontology museum, but were later destroyed during the April 1944 allied forces bombing of parts of Munich.

Ibrahim managed to track down Stromer’s surviving notes, sketches and photos at the Stromer family castle in Bavaria. With an international team of researchers that included paleontologist Paul Sereno, he found additional fossils for Spinosaurus in the Moroccan Sahara along desert cliffs known as the Kem Kem beds. During the dinosaur’s lifetime, this region was once a large river system, stretching from present-day Morocco to Egypt.

CT scanning and digital modeling determined that Spinosaurus was built for both land and marine life. Adaptations for swimming included dense bones similar to those of penguins and sea cows, feet with flat and broad claws that might have been used like paddles, a flexible tail that likely helped with propulsion in water, and much more.

Its crocodile-like head, long neck, and trunk shifted the dinosaur’s center of mass forward, such that the dinosaur looked “like a duck with the tail of an alligator attached to it,” according to Sereno.

“The jaws of Spinosaurus were long and slender, with big conical teeth,” Ibrahim said. “Perfect tools to catch slippery prey—fish, turtles, etc. The Kem Kem was a huge river system, full of big sawfish, lungfish, a car-sized coelacanth and several sharks. Those are the kinds of animals Spinosaurus would have preyed on.”

After grabbing a victim with its long teeth, the dinosaur would then “either swallow its prey whole or slice it into smaller pieces with its powerful arms and large claws.”

As a top predator in what Ibrahim said was “the lost world of African dinosaurs,” Spinosaurus had no direct rivals, but likely would have avoided confrontations with the other T. rex-sized carnivorous dinosaurs in the area.

Evidence suggests that Spinosaurus was not the only dinosaur in the world that willingly ventured into water. For example, Scott Persons of the University of Alberta discovered scratches that, he said, were left behind by the feet of a two-legged dinosaur doggy-paddling in a Chinese river 100 million years ago.

Persons explained, “The dinosaur’s claw marks show it was swimming along in this river and just its tippy toes were touching the bottom.”

The fossil record for this and other swimming dinosaurs, including Spinosaurus, is incomplete. It is therefore unclear if any of these animals evolved into fully aquatic species that might have survived the Cretaceous - Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.

The possibility is “very, very unlikely,” according to Ibrahim. He said, “We don’t have any evidence for little mini Spinosaurus surviving the extinction event.”

This article originally published at www.DiscoveryNews.com

26 Strangest Prehistoric Creatures

Friday, December 16, 2016

Platybelodon

Paleontologists, scientists and other researchers have collected enough samples over the years to form some pretty solid theories about what kinds of creatures used to roam this earth. If you’ve ever seen Jurassic Park or have been to a natural history museum, you’d know that life here used to consist of three things: huge monsters, dangerous plants and quick deaths. These 26 creatures used to roam the very ground you walk on today. You’ll be so glad they aren’t around any more…

Microraptor: Its name means “one who seizes.” It was a very small dinosaur and paleontologists have long debated the use of its four wings.

Restoration with colouration based on fossilized melanosomes by Durbed

Nyctosaurus: This ancient genus of Pterorsaur was found in the Mid-western sections of the US. The name means “naked reptile.”

Opabinia: This is one of the strangest creatures that ever lived. It had 30 flippers, 30 legs, a trunk-like nose and one lobster claw.

Scale diagram of various Burgess Shale invertebrates, Opabinia in green by Dinoguy2

Phorusrhacidae: People know this creature as the “terror bird.” It was one of the largest predatory birds that ever lived and could run at speeds up to 40mph.

Pterodaustro: Also known as the Pterosaurs, it had a wingspan of 4 feet. It’s bristle-like teeth implies it probably fed on a diet of plankton and small crustaceans.

Quetzalcoatlus: This was the largest pterosaur in the sky, as big is a common African giraffe. Its wingspan was 30 whole feet.

Sharovipteryx: Ths gliding reptile, found in Central Asia, was about one foot long. It would feed on insects and wasn’t capable of powered flight, it would just glide.
 

Life reconstruction of Sharovipteryx mirabilis by Dmitry Bogdanov

Stethacanthus: A type of extinct prehistoric shark, they would grow up to 6 feet long with a strange looking back growth on males.

Tanystropheus: Its name means “long necked one” and the prehistoric reptile was easily over 20 feet long.

Therizinosauridae: Or “reaper lizard,” may have been found in Mongolia, China, and the United States. Because they had long necks, pot bellies, four-toed feet, and beaky mouth, scientists weren’t sure if their parts belonged to one creature or several.

Archaeopteryx: The “first bird” supposedly existed during the Jurassic period, discovered in Germany in 1861.

Exhibit – Archaeopteryx Diorama. Photo by NationalDinosaurMuseum

Deinocheirus: There are only a handful of fossil remains of this creature, including two forelimbs and some vertebrae. Its name means “terrible hands.”

Deinotherium: The “hoe tusker” resembled a modern day elephant and were discovered at major hominid extinction sites at Lake Turkana in Kenya.

Dimorphodon: This flying creature had two distinct types of teeth in its jaw. It had great eyesight and huge claws for hunting.

Dunkleosteus: Or “Dunkle’s bone,” was one of the largest armored jaw fishes that ever existed. It was one of the fiercest predators in the ocean. It could be up to 10 meters long and weighed 3.6 tons.

Dunkleosteus by NTamura on Deviantart

Elasmosaurus: This creature could be up to 46 feet in length (with most of its length in its neck). Its neck was 4x larger than a giraffe’s.

Epidendrosaurus: This was the first reptile to be closer ro a bird than a dinosaur. It was about 6 inches long, with clawed hands on its arms/wings.

Epidexipteryx: These small, feathered dinosaurs were found in the Inner Mongolia region of China. Their large display feathers were the earliest known representation of ornamental feathers in the fossil record.

Hallucigenia: A relative of modern arthropods, Hallucigenia is a strange creature only 3 millimeters long. It has a bulbous round head connected to its cylindrical trunk. It was an ancestor of today’s velvet worms.

Helicoprion: Also known as “spiral saw,” this shark-like cartilaginous fish appeared in the late Carboniferous era. The only evidence of its existence was a curled-up coil of triangular teeth. Some scientists think that it was used to grind shells, while others believed it to be a weapon.

Restoration of H. bessonovi by Nobu Tamura

 Jaekelopterus: This sea scorpion was massive, at an estimated length of 2.5 meters. It was one of the largest arthropods ever discovered. It supposedly STILL exists in present day freshwater rivers and lakes in Germany.

Josephoartigasia: This capybara-like animal was the biggest rodent on the planet, weighing up to 1000kg.

Liopleurodon: This marine predator lived on a diet of fish, squid, and other sea reptiles. It was bigger than a sperm whale and its skull was nearly 1/4 of its body, filled with many smooth teeth.

Longisquama: This creature was known as the first archosaur to have been able to glide or parachute. It is known for its elongated pair of scales along its back, with the anterior ones resembling feathers.

Megalania: Otherwise known as the giant ripper lizard, it fed on a diet of mammals, snakes, other reptiles, and birds. A modern day relative would be the Komodo dragon that inhabits the Flores Islands in Indonesia.

Megalania skeletal reconstruction on Melbourne Museum steps. Photo by Cas Liber

Platybelodon (cover pic): ("flat-spear tusk") was a genus of large herbivorous mammal related to the elephant (order Proboscidea). It lived during the late Miocene Epoch in Asia and the Caucasus.

Source: www.list25.com

10 Strange Looking Dinosaurs

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Concavenator restoration by Raul Martin

To date, paleontologists have named nearly a thousand dinosaurs, but only a handful stand out from the rest—not for size, or for viciousness, but for sheer weirdness. A plant-eating ornithopod covered with feathers? A tyrannosaur with the snout of a crocodile? A horned, frilled ceratopsian sporting a hairdo worthy of a 1950's TV evangelist?

Amargasaurus

Amargasaurus by Raul Lunia

As sauropods go, Amargasaurus was a true runt: this early Cretaceous dinosaur measured a scant 30 feet long from head to tail and weighed only two or three tons. What really set it apart, though, were the prickly spines lining its neck, which appear to have evolved as a sexually selected characteristic (that is, males with more prominent spines were more attractive to females during mating season).

It’s also possible that the spines of Amargasaurus supported a thin flap of skin or fatty flesh, similar to the back sail of the slightly later meat-eating dinosaur Spinosaurus.

Concavenator

The carcharodontosaurid Concavenator corovatus ambushing the ornithomimosaurian Pelecanimimus polydon in the Early Cretaceous of Las Hoyas, Spain. Author: Durbed

Concavenator is a truly weird dinosaur for two reasons, the first obvious at a glance, the second requiring more careful inspection. First, this meat-eater was equipped with a strange, triangular hump in the center of its back, which may have supported an ornate sail of skin and bone, or may just have been, well, a strange, triangular hump. Second, Concavenator’s forearms were decorated with “quill knobs,” which likely sprouted colorful feathers during mating season; otherwise, this early Cretaceous theropod was presumably as lizard-skinned as an Allosaurus.

Kosmoceratops

Teratophoneus vs Kosmoceratops by PaleoGuy.deviantart.com

The Greek root “kosmo” in Kosmoceratops doesn’t mean “cosmic”–rather, it translates as “ornate”–but “cosmic” will do just fine when describing a dinosaur that sported such a psychedelic array of frills, flaps and horns. The secret to Kosmoceratops’ bizarre appearance is that this ceratopsian dinosaur lived on a relatively isolated island of late Cretaceous North America, Laramidia, and was thus free to evolve in its, er, cosmic direction.

As with other such adaptations in the animal kingdom, the elaborate ‘do of Kosmoceratops males was clearly intended to win over the opposite sex during mating season.

Kulindadromeus

Kulindadromeus by Andrey Atuchin

For decades before the discovery of Kulindadromeus, paleontologists abided by a hard-and-fast rule: the only dinosaurs to sport feathers were the small, two-legged, meat-eating theropods of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The trouble with Kulindadromeus, announced to the world in 2014, is that this feathered dinosaur wasn’t a theropod but an ornithopod–the small, two-legged, plant-eating ornithischians that were previously assumed to possess scaly, lizard-like skin.

What’s more, if Kulindadromeus had feathers, it may also have been equipped with a warm-blooded metabolism–which would require rewriting a few dinosaur books.

Nothronychus

Nothronychus mckinleyi. Photo by Kabacchi

You may, perhaps, have heard of Therizinosaurus, a bizarre, long-clawed, pot-bellied dinosaur of central Asia that looked like a cross between Big Bird and Cousin Itt from The Addams Family. For the purposes of this list, however, we’ve decided to feature Therizinosaurus’ cousin Nothronychus, the first dinosaur of its kind ever to be discovered in North America, after paleontologists had concluded that therizinosaurs were a strictly Asian phenomenon.

Like its more famous relative, Nothronychus appears to have pursued a completely herbivorous diet–a rather strange evolutionary choice for a confirmed theropod (the same family that includes tyrannosaurs and raptors).

Oryctodromeus

Restoration of an individual Oryctodromeus in its burrow FunkMonk (Michael B. H.)

In retrospect, it should come as no surprise that the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era anticipated the ecological niches of the megafauna mammals that lived millions of years later, during the Cenozoic Era. But paleontologists were still unprepared for the discovery of Oryctodromeus, a six-foot-long, 50-pound ornithopod that inhabited burrows in the forest floor, like an oversized badger or armadillo.

Even more weirdly, given its lack of specialized claws, Oryctodromeus must have excavated its burrows using its long, pointy snout–which would surely have been a comical sight for any theropods in the immediate vicinity. (Why did Oryctodromeus burrow in the first place? To avoid the attention of the larger predators of its middle Cretaceous ecosystem.)

Qianzhousaurus

Qianzhousaurus by Chuang Zhao

Better known as “Pinocchio Rex,” Qianzhousaurus was a strange duck indeed–a tyrannosaur equipped with a long, pointed, crocodile-like snout reminiscent of an entirely different branch of the theropod family, the spinosaurs (typified by Spinosaurus). The trouble is, we know the reason dinosaurs like Spinosaurus and Baryonyx had elongated snouts was that they lived by (or in) rivers and hunted fish.

The evolutionary motivation for Qianzhousaurus’ schnozz is a bit more uncertain, since this late Cretaceous dinosaur appears to have subsisted exclusively on terrestrial prey. The most likely explanation is, you guessed it, sexual selection; males with bigger snouts were more attractive to females during mating season.

Rhinorex

Rhinorex by Julius Csotonyi

Wait, we’re not done with big-nosed dinosaurs yet! Rhinorex, the “nose king,” comes by its name honestly: this hadrosaur was equipped with a huge, fleshy, protuberant schnozz, which it probably used to signal other members of the herd with loud blasts and blares (and yes, of course, you know the drill, to attract members of the opposite sex during mating season). This duck-billed dinosaur of late Cretaceous North America was closely related to the better-attested Gryposaurus, which possessed an equally disproportionate honker, but didn’t have the luck to be named by a paleontologist with a sense of humor.

Stygimoloch

Stygimoloch by wildman1411 on DeviantArt

Its name alone–which can be roughly translated from the Greek as “horned demon from the river of hell”–is a good indication of Stygimoloch‘s weirdness quotient. This dinosaur possessed the biggest, boniest noggin of any identified pachycephalosaur (“thick-headed lizard”); presumably the males head-butted each other, and occasionally rendered each other unconscious, for the right to mate with females.

Unfortunately, it may also turn out that the “type specimen” of Stygimoloch was merely an advanced growth stage of the better-known bone-headed dinosaur Pachycephalosarus, in which case the latter genus would take pride of place on this list.

Yutyrannus

Replica Yutyrannus huali skeletons mounted in a fighting pose inspired by Charles R. Knight’s painting of Laelaps. Dino-Kingdom 2012, Tokyo, Japan. Author: Laika ac

Would you be terrified of a rampaging Tyrannosaurus rex if it happened to be covered with bright orange feathers? That’s the question you have to ask when discussing Yutyrannus, a recently discovered tyrannosaur of early Cretaceous Asia that supplemented its two-ton bulk with a feathery covering that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Big Bird. More weirdly, the existence of Yutyrannus raises the possibility that all tyrannosaurs were covered with feathers at some stage of their life cycles–even the big, fierce T. rex.

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