Author Topic: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread  (Read 117555 times)

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Offline TheBlackCat

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #250 on: September 13, 2010, 08:25:13 PM »
A recent article is saying that Tricerotops are actually juveniles of what was thought to be a different genus of ceratopsian, Torosaurus.  It was known that Tricerotops changes its frill and horn shape and layout over time, but after surveying a large number of individuals the scientists say that these changes gradually turn a Tricerotops into a Torosaurus.  Due to the rules of naming, since Tricerotops was named first it will get to keep its name while Torosaurus will have to give up its name.  It's hard to think of an animal the size of a small bus as a juvenile.
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #251 on: September 14, 2010, 01:33:09 AM »
It's not worth getting excited about yet.
 
I've written extensively about it on my personal blog:
 
http://whenpigsfly-returns.blogspot.com/2010/08/torosaurus-latus-is-not-sp.html
 
and
 
http://whenpigsfly-returns.blogspot.com/2010/07/toroceratops.html
 
Both posts resulted in dozens of impassioned comments from both camps.
 
There are quite a few SVP talks this year on the subject. Unfortunately, I cannot attend.
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Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #252 on: September 19, 2010, 10:47:21 AM »
Halbred, I found some t-shirts I thought you may like.

http://controversy.wearscience.com/

I don't get all of them, but I thought some of them were right up your alley.

Offline TheBlackCat

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #253 on: September 19, 2010, 11:43:55 AM »
Those are great.  Which ones don't you get?  I could explain if you want.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2010, 11:46:57 AM by TheBlackCat »
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Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #254 on: September 19, 2010, 11:49:59 AM »

I don't get:Russel's Tea pot
Invisible Unicorn
The Four Humors

I'm also not 100% sure on:
Classical Periodic Table (Aether?)
Time Cube

& is the Alchemy one Lead --> Gold?
I didn't want to look it up.

Offline TheBlackCat

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #255 on: September 19, 2010, 01:56:12 PM »
Russel's Tea pot: Bertrand Russel used a teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars to explain why he rejected religion.  I can't say more without violating board rules.  The Wikipedia article on the subject is good.

Invisible Unicorn: The Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is a parody religion, similar to Russel's teapot in principle but put in a form more similar to real religions.  There is a link to the article on it, and several similar parody religions, on the Russel's teapot wikipedia article above.

The Four Humors: It was thought that the bloodstream was composed of four humours, or fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  Disease was thought to be due to an imbalance in the humours, and bloodletting was intended to restore this balance.  Despite being the dominant medical system in Europe for thousands of years it doesn't actually bear any resemblance to reality in any way.

Classical Periodic Table: It was known for a long time that light was composed of waves, but since all other known waves were distortions in a medium (like sounds wave are distortions in air), it was thought that light was a distortion in a medium called "Ether" or "Aether".  However, very sensitive experiments were unable to detect it.  Massless aether and quantum mechanics made the same predictions, so aether was abandoned as unnecessary (see Occam's razor).

Time Cube: Time cube is possibly the most deranged crackpot site on the entire internet.  It is also unintelligible, racist, and genocidal.  For instance, the guy who is behind it thinks everyone who won't accept it (which is pretty much everyone in the world) should be killed.  He even reject basic arithmetic, claiming that the idea that -1*-1=1 is the result of a conspiracy.  "Timecubes" is a unit of measure for how nutty a crackpot idea is, with values ranging from 0 to 10.

& is the Alchemy one Lead --> Gold?:  Correct
« Last Edit: September 19, 2010, 02:06:56 PM by TheBlackCat »
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #256 on: September 19, 2010, 07:44:19 PM »
I have several a few T-shirts from that website! Two are "Teach the Controversy" shirts. One has a picture of a human using a Triceratops to plow, and another has the devil burrying dinosaur bones. Then I have one of a pterosaur picking up a car, and it says "F*cking Pterodacyls." Soooo great.

Brusatte et al. just published a paper about tyrannosaurs in general...I'll have more to say once I've read it!
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Offline ThePerm

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #257 on: September 20, 2010, 05:50:49 PM »
also, to note, medical technology has had its up and downs. During the dark ages "physicians" got really dumb, but during the classical period before it there were pretty competent doctors.

i would totally buy all the Sir Critter shirts if i could afford it.
« Last Edit: September 20, 2010, 05:58:04 PM by ThePerm »
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #258 on: September 22, 2010, 01:24:54 PM »
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plosone.org%2Farticle%2Finfo%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012292&h=eb74c
 
Two brand-spanking new chasmosaurine ceratopsids from Utah: Utahceratops and Kosmosaurus. The former is a sister taxon to Pentaceratops while the latter is a sister taxon to Vagaceratops.
 
Utahceratops is unique in having a teardrop-shaped nasal horn that sits almost entirely behind the nasal opening. This gives it a very long snout. Also strangely, the brow horns are small and laterally-directed rather than pointing forward. The frill is similar to Anchiceratops and Pentaceratops. It is a large chasmosaurine, and much of the post-cranial skeleton is known.
 
Kosmoceratops is smaller than Utahceratops but unbelievably wierd. It has a short, blunted nasal horn and it also has laterally-directed brow horns that actually grow in arcs along their lengths! The frill is very short for a chasmosaurine, and the parietal fenestrae are small. Most amazingly, eight finger-like projections overlay the dorsal margin of the frill (like bangs), and a large hook-like spike originates at each upper corner of the frill. Kosmoceratops has the most decorative head of any dinosaur ever!
 
Almost more importantly, the two genera add to an increasingly clear picture of ceratopsid radiation and evolution in North America. During the Late Cretaceous, a giant shallow sea--the Sundance or Western Interior Seaway--split North America into two distinct landmasses. The western half was basically just a ribbon of land with young mountain ranges on the western coast and beachfront property on the east cost. Most of North America's dinosaurs, including all known ceratopsids (with one Chinese exception) roamed this strip of land.
 
But what's especially odd is that this strip of land was about a third the square footage of Africa, and probably smaller at times. And yet we have multiple large herbivores living at any one time, all of which were about the mass of an elephant, being pursued by large carnivores. Each distinct time period seems to be marked by a unique community of herbivores: two kinds of duckbills, two kinds of ceratopsids, and an ankylosaur or two. Each species is replaced, possibly through anagenesis, over millions of years. No species lived much longer than a million years, and there are very few cases of overlap between communities.
 
It's very strange, especially when you take home ranges and plant resources into consideration. It implies that these herbivorous dinosaurs had lower metabolic demands than modern herbivores, or the plant life was more sustainable and lush, or both.
 
Even better? The southern and northern communities of this strip of land are quite different, and there is no overlap. That is, you don't find any Pentaceratops in the north AND the south. This division persists until the latest Cretaceous, when Torosaurus pops up in Utah and Montana. Theoretically, that means there was some kind of environmental or geographic barrier preventing faunal exchange between the north and the south, but we don't know what that is yet. It's possible that a persistent river system or an expansion of the Sundance Sea divided that strip of land, but there isn't evidence for it...yet.
 
Download that paper (it's free) and give it a read. Fascinating stuff!
 
 
« Last Edit: September 23, 2010, 04:06:39 PM by Halbred »
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Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #259 on: October 01, 2010, 01:39:41 AM »
Size 8.5 Happy Feet?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/photogalleries/100930-new-species-giant-penguin-red-science-feathers-pictures/
Quote
The 36-million-year-old giant penguin species Inkayacu paracasensis stood nearly as tall as a man and sported shades of red and gray (pictured in an artist's reconstruction), scientists announced Thursday.

Offline ThePerm

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #260 on: October 01, 2010, 04:05:30 AM »
the new Ceratops, their not just going to end up being different breeds of the same species are they?



i thought it was funny them finding that two species were just different age groups of the same species

Komodo dragons are also very different when their born, when their young they can climb up trees.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2010, 04:23:57 AM by ThePerm »
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #261 on: October 01, 2010, 01:28:38 PM »
You speak of the Torosaurus/Triceratops debacle. The jury's out on that one--there's good reason to think the authors are incorrect in their idea that Torosaurus is just a "fully adult" Triceratops.
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #262 on: October 09, 2010, 10:05:55 PM »
Awesomeness: The local museum source store is closing, so everything in the store was 80% off. The wife and I went in to look around. It was pretty picked over, but I found a bunch of enrolled trilobites and...OMG two glyptodont shell scutes! They're surprisingly large. I'm going to try and figure out the species. The label says they're from Argentina, which is certainly probable given that they're glyptodonts. I'll post pictures (somewhere) when I discover their identity!
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #263 on: October 21, 2010, 07:30:23 PM »
GIANT TEASER

I'm doing a ton of research on Pachyrhinosaurus. There's a reason. I won't say anything until "it's" official.
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Offline ThePerm

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #265 on: November 25, 2010, 01:37:28 AM »
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #266 on: November 25, 2010, 02:28:27 AM »
Not really paleo news, but yeah, how cool is that? Looks like something that SHOULD be extinct!

I could've posted a few days ago about two new iguanadonts from Utah, but I don't really care about iguanadonts. At least their names are pretty pimp: Iguanacolossus and Hippodraco.
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Offline ShyGuy

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #267 on: January 13, 2011, 08:11:15 PM »
Only a few thousand years ago bump!

Pleistocene news
http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Clone+technique+could+revive+animal/4104425/story.html

We're bringing back the mammoth people.

Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #268 on: January 13, 2011, 10:02:49 PM »
Only a few thousand years ago bump!

Pleistocene news
http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Clone+technique+could+revive+animal/4104425/story.html

We're bringing back the mammoth people.

I guess pretty soon we will be able to revive the Dodo bird, and in a few years give pandas and tigers a much needed revival from extinction too.

When is it gonna be known that some mad scientist has been trying this out on humans? I wanna see the results of some human cloning already.

Offline ThePerm

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #269 on: January 13, 2011, 10:03:49 PM »
time to preserve penguin and polar bear dna
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Offline Halbred

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #270 on: January 14, 2011, 06:16:14 PM »
Forgot this thread existed.
 
New discovery announced yesterday: Eodromaeus, a new incredibly basal theropod from Argentina. It is more derived that Herrerasaurus but less so than last year's Tawa, which has more in common with "coelophysoid"-grade theropods. Eodromaeus was a small theropod with lots of primitive features, including small teeth on the epopterygoid and the retention of a fifth metacarpal.
 
Almost more important is that the previously oldest-known theropod, Eoraptor, is actually a basal (if not the MOST basal) sauropodomorph. Back in 1993, when Eoraptor was announced, we didn't have a good record of Triassic sauropodomorphs aside from advanced prosauropods. The last few years have given us Saturnalia, Panphagia, and Chromigosaurus, which help identify basal sauropodomorph characters. Eoraptor has more in common with Saturnalia and Panphagia than theropods, so there it goes. This makes more sense when you look at Eoraptor's dentition--always a source of some contention. Its teeth are more spatulate, waisted, and full of denticles than early theropods. Eoraptor was likely a part-time, if not full herbivore.
 
Having Eoraptor on the sauropodomorph side, Eodromaeus on the theropod side, and Lesothosaurus on the ornithischian side (and, probably, heterodontosaurs), we can pretty confidently show what the common ancestor of all dinosaurs looked like: a small (between one and two meter) bipedal cursorial animal that was probably omnivorous to some degree and had long arms with grasping hands.
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Offline ThePerm

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #271 on: January 15, 2011, 05:54:49 PM »
haha, i spent yesterday researching Theropods, good to hear theropod news from our resident paleontologist.

Another thing im wondering...with greenland thawing out, what type of dinosaurs will they find?
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Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #272 on: January 15, 2011, 08:37:23 PM »
Another thing im wondering...with greenland thawing out, what type of dinosaurs will they find?

If they find any at all, I'm gonna put my money on the extinct kind :)

Offline Toruresu

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #273 on: January 17, 2011, 08:43:30 PM »
What do you guys think of this?


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110117/wl_asia_afp/japansciencemammoth_20110117104445


Jurassic Park to become a reality?
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Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
« Reply #274 on: February 17, 2011, 01:30:49 PM »
I got some Paleo-news pertaining to the Marvel-era of dino history

Halbred, I'm sure you are gonna love this and want to make t-shirts out of some of them
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cadencejunkie/sets/72157625580764074/with/5284199167/

The Avengersaurs


The Full Set

Iron Brontosaurus  -  Captain Ameritops  -  Hulkasaurus Rex  -  AnkloTHORus
Stegolossus  -  PteranoSTORM  -  Wolveraptor  -  Paracyclophus
Gambilophosaurus  -  Nightcrawlimimus  -  Daredevilnotauros  -  Deadpachycepoolosaurus
« Last Edit: February 17, 2011, 01:35:07 PM by BlackNMild2k1 »