#Paleontologists

[blueiscoool]

Complete Mastodon Jaw Fossil Found in New York

The homeowner initially found two teeth hidden by a plant on the property, and after digging just a few inches underneath that, two more teeth were found.

A historic (or perhaps more accurately, prehistoric) discovery was made just under the surface of a New York homeowner’s lawn.

A complete mastodon jaw was found in the backyard of a home in the Orange County town of Scotchtown, according to state officials. The jaw, along with additional bone fragments, was recovered by researchers from the New York State Museum and SUNY Orange, the state Education Department said in a press release Tuesday.

It was the first find of its kind in New York in more than 11 years, the officials said.

The mastodon jaw, which was believed to be from an adult, was unearthed by researchers after the homeowner spotted it coming out from his lawn. The homeowner initially found two teeth hidden by a plant on the property, and after digging just a few inches underneath that, two more teeth were found.

“When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to call in the experts,” the homeowner said.

Staff from the museum and university led excavation efforts after that, and uncovered the well-preserved jaw of the mastodon — an ancient relative of modern elephants. A piece of a toe bone and a rib fragment were found as well, officials said.

“While the jaw is the star of the show, the additional toe and rib fragments offer valuable context and the potential for additional research,” said Dr. Cory Harris, Chair of SUNY Orange’s Behavioral Sciences Department. “We are also hoping to further explore the immediate area to see if there are any additional bones that were preserved.”

The fossils will undergo carbon dating and analysis in order to determine just how long ago the mammal was roaming the area, what the diet consisted of, and details of its habitat, according to officials, who noted that the discovery will be featured in public programming starting in 2025.

“This discovery is a testament to the rich paleontological history of New York and the ongoing efforts to understand its past,” said Dr. Robert Feranec, director of Research & Collections and curator of Ice Age Animals at the New York State Museum. “This mastodon jaw provides a unique opportunity to study the ecology of this magnificent species, which will enhance our understanding of the Ice Age ecosystems from this region.”

About 150 mastodon fossils have been found to date across New York, about a third of which found in Orange County.

[theantiazdarcho]

longisquama

[mindblowingscience]

The fossil record is biased against bats. The flying mammals are small, making their fossilized remains very hard to find. And their light skeletons—ideal for flying around—mean it takes special circumstances for their bodies to be preserved. And yet, against these odds, paleontologists recently uncovered the exceptionally complete skeleton of what now stands as the earliest known bat.

To date, the most complete early bat fossils have come from an area paleontologists call Fossil Lake in Wyoming. The rock layers are world-famous for containing beautifully preserved fish, birds, mammals and other organisms that lived in the area about 52 million years ago. Among the stunning fossils recovered from these rocks, Naturalis Biodiversity Center paleontologist Tim Rietbergen and colleagues report Wednesday in PLOS One, are fossils of a new bat species the researchers have named Icaronycteris gunnelli. By comparing this new species with other early bats, paleontologists are beginning to develop a deeper understanding of how bats spread around the world in that period.

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[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Tonight's Live stream

I hope many of you will be tuning in to the live stream about the knew Allosaurus species. It will be broadcast on three platforms.

See you there!

[misterrogers22]

0:00 - Introduction

Welcome to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast podcast, the Jurassic Park podcast about Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and also not about that, too.  Find the episode webpage at: Episode 38 - Tim. www.jurassickparkcast.blogspot.com/2022/11/episode-38-tim.html

07:25 - Interview with terrific guest Dr. Roger Lederer

In this episode, my terrific guest Dr. Roger J. Lederer joins the show to chat with me about:

16:03 - Lederer's "Role of Rictal Bristles" paper

37:30 - Paleontological papers referencing Lederer's paper on rictal bristles

47:43 - the names of birds and dinosaurs

turkeys, Thanksgiving, turkey vultures, disposing of carcasses, registering domain names, the fastest birds, ostriches, the bustard, the elephant bird, rictal bristles, flycatchers, studying birds, DNA, Watson and Crick, cloning extinct animals, Loy's procedure, reverse breeding aurochs, birds are dinosaurs!, archaeopteryx, the evolution of feathers, the feather-colour of microraptors, enantiornithines, Dr. Richard Prum and the evolution of feathers, theories on the evolution of feathered flight, herons hunting, Crichton using Lederer's name in the text!, the Hoatzin, A Reappraisal of Azhdarchid Pterosaur Functional Morphology and Paleoecology; Bristles before down: A new perspective on the functional origin of feathers; A review of the Taxonomy and Paleoecology of the Anuro-gnathidae, strange feather uses, ubirajara jubatus, "raptor" nomenclature, tyrannidae, birds being territorial and mean, cassowaries, The Gobbler!, and much more!

You can find way more neat bird data on Dr. Lederer's website www.ornithology.com.

Plus dinosaur news about:

02:14 - A new ‘duck-billed’ dinosaur(Ornithischia: Hadrosauridae) from the upper Campanian of Texas points to agreater diversity of early hadrosaurid offshoots

04:21 - The role of Avian Rictal Bristles 

00:36 - Featuring the music of Snale https://snalerock.bandcamp.com/releases 

Intro: Grow Old Or Don't. 

Outro: Centipede.

The Text: This week’s text is Tim, spanning from pages 204 – 210.

57:58 - Synopsis of the chapter Tim, from Jurassic Park

A concussed Tim Murphy awakes from the tyrannosaur attack to find himself trapped in a car, atop a tree. He climbs out of the tree, as the Land Cruiser crashes down above him. 

01:02:54 - Analyzing the literary and stylistic techniques in the chapter Tim

01:13:27 - Discussions surround Show Don't Tell, Storytelling and Tension

Corrections:

Side effects:  May cause you to totally miss the point. 

Find it on iTunes, on Spotify (click here!) or on Podbean (click here). Thank you! The Jura-Sick Park-cast is a part of the Spring Chickens banner of amateur intellectual properties including the Spring Chickens funny pages, Tomb of the Undead graphic novel, the Second Lapse graphic novelettes, The Infantry, and the worst of it all, the King St. Capers. You can find links to all that baggage in the show notes, or by visiting the schickens.blogpost.com or finding us on Facebook, at Facebook.com/SpringChickenCapers or me, I’m on twitter at @RogersRyan22 or email me at ryansrogers-at-gmail.com.  Thank you, dearly, for tuning in to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast, the Jurassic Park podcast where we talk about the novel Jurassic Park, and also not that, too. Until next time! 

[ancientstuff]

Fascinating story.

[writingwithfolklore]

im not sure if this counts but i acnt really find much info om how much the ratio of body size to wing ratios it would require for a mordern pterodactyl to take off without having to use its forelimbs?

Also if anyone has any aerodynamics programs i would love to see them

Thanks

Anyone on here a paleontologist? Or know about aerodynamics?

(This is from our research game!)

You guys know the drill, send this around until we find someone who knows!

(If not, this sounds like a situation that you could fictionalize. Send me a message if you want to talk more about it!)

[gaasubap]

"you can't judge people in the past" doesn't even apply to past paleontologists.

Y'all telling me they couldn't find a single butcher to ask about how to puzzle them bones?

Nah. They were dumb rich kids and you can't prove me wrong.

(I also don't know shit about Chinese paleontology history. Or any other country actually. I wonder who got closest fastest)

((also also the bone wars))

(((tangent. Did you hear what that one guy did to Troy?)))

[tff-praefectus]

Mosasaur jaw section

[vespertinecat]

Reblogging from you because you and so many others are detailing how awesome this last one is and I absolutely agree. Part of that is courtesy to Deinocheirus!

Deinocheirus literally translates to "horrible hand." These fossils, iirc, were the first we found of it! We didn't find any skulls or complete specimens until much later. Looking it up right quick, their arms alone were pretty darn imposing at nearly 8 feet/2.4 meters in length! The dinosaur as a whole is something like 36 feet/11 meters long. Buuut. These guys were omnivores, and when they did eat meat it was usually smaller. Basically, you probably wouldn't be lunch for one of these guys.

Short post of paleontologists absolutely slaying photo shoots with their discoveries. Please add more such images if you have them.

[blueiscoool]

STEGOSAURUS WYOMING, USA

From the Meilyn Quarry, Medicine Bow, Carbon County, Wyoming, Late Jurassic (circa 157-145 million years ago). The specimen of Stegosaurus sp. preserved with fossil bones of a black colour; approximately 144 fossil bone elements with additional cast, sculpted and 3D printed material, mounted on custom frame.

Initial excavation in 2002. Quarry and specimen acquired by current owner 2008. Additional excavation campaigns 2017-2018. Final prep work and mounting in Germany, 2023.

Sold at auction for almost $5,400,000.

[theantiazdarcho]

The Lancetfish is a species that looks like it comes straight out of a realistic fantasy world building project.

[mindblowingscience]

More than 255 million years ago, in what’s now South Africa, enormous amphibians floated and swam through the ancient shallows. Paleontologists know this not from petrified bones but from marks left in the sediment by the living creatures. The Dave Green paleosurface, in the eastern portion of South Africa’s Karoo Basin, is covered with the tracks and body impressions of amphibious creatures that grew to more than five feet in length. “The more you look, the more you find,” says paleontologist David Groenewald of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Groenewald and colleagues described the fossils, attributed to animals called rhinesuchid temnospondyls, Wednesday in PLOS One. Formed near the end of the Permian Period, prior to the world’s worst mass extinction, the expanse of olive-green rock was laid down by rivers that threaded across the prehistoric landscape. Those waterways, it would seem, were home to large amphibious vertebrates that paleontologists know as temnospondyls—roughly salamander-like animals that could grow to impressive sizes, effectively the alligators of their time. While temnospondyl bones have given paleontologists a general idea of what these animals looked like, the trace fossils are effectively the prehistoric behavior of these animals locked in stone.

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[xtruss]

Fossilized Remains of 340-Pound Giant Penguin Found in New Zealand

(Sputnik, Wednesday February 08, 2023) —There are 17 to 19 species of penguins living today, most in the Southern Hemisphere. Also found in New Zealand and parts of Zealandia, are other flightless birds - like an ancestor to New Zealand’s beloved Kiwi and a giant “elephant bird” that also lived in Madagascar as recently as 800 years ago.

Fossilized remains of the largest penguin known to science were recently discovered in New Zealand, shocking researchers who determined the massive bird weighed hundreds of pounds.

Named Kumimanu Fordycei, Paleontologists believe the species could have weighed up to 340 pounds. By comparison, the average adult Male Western Lowland Gorilla Weighs about 300 pounds.

The fossil was discovered in a 57-million-year-old boulder that had been cracked open with the tides. Along with it they also found the remains of several individual specimens of another large but not quite as big previously undiscovered ancient penguin named Petradyptes stonehousei and fragments of two smaller yet-unnamed species of ancient penguins.

Scientists estimate the newly-discovered penguins lived around 60 million years ago. Petradyptes, they estimate, weighed around 110 pounds, far smaller than the Kumimanu, but still large for a penguin. The emperor penguin, the largest penguin on Earth today, can weigh up to just 88 pounds.

The fossils were discovered by Alan Tennyson, a paleontologist at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 2017, but were described and named on Wednesday in the Journal of Paleontology.

Most of what scientists know about the Kumimanu fordycei came from a humerus bone, which was nine and a half inches long - about twice the length of those in the emperor penguin.

Paleontologists have been unable to determine the height of the ancient giant penguin but one estimated that it probably stood about 5 feet 2 inches. That gives the giant penguin a stocky build - the average aforementioned Western Lowland Gorilla 🦍 stands at about 6 feet while being roughly 40 pounds lighter.

Coming from an older branch of the tree of the penguin evolutionary tree, both the Kumimanu and Petradyptes differed in appearance from modern day penguins in more ways than just their size. Paleontologists say they had primitive flippers that resembled flying and diving birds like puffins. Their leg structure was also angled forward, unlike modern penguins whose legs are shaped like an upside down “L” coming out of their spine.

Scientists Discover New Penguin Colony in Antarctica Using Satellite Imagery (January 20, 2023)! “This is an exciting discovery. The new satellite images of Antarctica's coastline have enabled us to find many new colonies. And whilst this is good news, like many of the recently discovered sites, this colony is small and in a region badly affected by recent sea ice loss,” the British Antarctic Survey's Dr Peter Fretwell said.

'Human-Sized Penguin' Uncovered by New Zealand Schoolchildren Reveals Ancient Species (09/17/202)!

Mike Safely, president of the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club, says this is an experience that the children involved will remember for the rest of their lives. “It was a rare privilege for the kids in our club to have the opportunity to discover and rescue this enormous fossil penguin.”

Dr. Daniel Thomas, a senior lecturer in zoology from Massey’s School of Natural and Computational Sciences, determined that the fossil was between 27.3 million and 34.6 million years old. Thomas compared the identified species to the Kairaku penguins that were first described from Otago, but with much longer legs.

"Longer legs would have made the penguin much taller than other Kairuku species while it was walking on land; perhaps around 1.4m tall, and may have influenced how fast it could swim or how deep it could dive."

New Zealand has been a hot spot for finding ancient penguin fossils. In 2017, a closely related Kumimanu biceae was described as living just a few million years after the fordycei and weighed 220 pounds. The slightly slimmer giant penguin had a sharp “stork-like” beak that researchers think may have been used to stab prey. The beak of the Kuminmanu fordycei has not yet been discovered.

In 2021, a 4.5-feet tall penguin with unusually long legs was described after a group of students in a fossil hunting club found fossilized remains on a small peninsula in the Kawhia Harbor during a field trip.

One explanation for why giant penguins thrived at the time is because they evolved shortly after the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs hit Earth. That impact also killed most of the sea-faring reptiles, leaving a niche open for a large amphibious predator to fill their space. Sea-faring mammals, like seals and whales, had not yet evolved. Paleontologists hypothesize that once mammals reentered the sea, the giant penguins were out-competed and only the smaller penguins survived.

It is also worth noting that scientists now believe New Zealand and the Island of New Caledonia are a part of the Earth’s eighth continent, with most of the landmass sitting below the sea. This continent is known as Zealandia, which they believe broke off from the Southern Hemisphere supercontinent of Gondwana about 105 million years ago.

What would become Zealandia then stretched out in a process scientists don’t yet understand. Scientists are still debating if most Zealandia was always submerged, with just small islands poking out, or if it sank at one point. In either case, a sinking continent or a collection of islands make for a natural habitat for penguins. If it did sink, scientists estimate that it would have taken over a hundred million years, meaning the giant penguins could have lived while much of Zealandia was still above sea level.

[myredpandasarecool]

I need all paleontologists to know that the giraffatitan is now called giraffe-a-dinosaur accordingto my 3 year old. This is official, please update all documents immediately