Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘paleontologist’

Niger’s Dinosaur Bones

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 28, 2023| 9 Comments »

Photo: Filippo Bertozzo​​, Fabio Marco Dalla Vecchia​, Matteo Fabbri via Wikimedia Commons.
Ouranosaurus bones are among the many wonders found in Niger. For scale, the right femur is about a yard long.

Niger turns out to be a treasure trove for paleontology and archaeology, and as Nick Roll reports at the Christian Science Monitor, the country is working to develop enough local experts to deal with the riches. It’s not so farfetched in a place where nomads are already texting researchers about archaeological finds.

“Goats, cows, and pedestrians wander by the two unassuming shipping containers along a street in Niger’s riverside capital without a second thought. But inside lie nearly 50 tons of dinosaur bones wrapped in plaster – potentially some of the most significant paleontological finds this landlocked West African country, and even the continent, has ever known.

“There are fossils from perhaps as many as 100 different species, some of them from ancient animals never seen before. 

“ ‘Small animals, mammals, flying reptiles, turtles’ as well as a 40-foot crocodile and ‘a dozen large dinosaurs that are new, including huge 60-footers, says American paleontologist Paul Sereno.

“Getting them to the capital was years in the making – and their journey isn’t over. The initial discoveries were made in 2018 and 2019, in the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert. It would take time and funding for a proper dig, though, so the paleontologists covered them up and buried them, hoping the winds wouldn’t expose them to curious nomads or dangerous smugglers. 

“Then COVID-19 hit, shutting everything down until finally, last fall, Professor Sereno could return to unearth the fossils again.  

“ ‘Niger is going to tell Africa’s story during the dinosaur era,’ he says. …

“The bones, soon to be shipped to Dr. Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago for research, represent paleontology’s latest win against the harsh desert environment of Niger, which is home not only to fossils but also to soaring temperatures, shifting dunes, and various armed groups.

“But Chicago won’t be the bones’ final resting place. The fossils are earmarked to be eventually returned to Niger, where the kernels of a formal paleontology sector are being planted in a country that contains some of the richest paleontological finds in Africa but boasts no paleontologists of its own, or even academic programs dedicated to the field. 

“ ‘Each time, we see that we find new dinosaurs, new fossils that permit us to say that the soil is rich – unlike other countries, and other continents,’ says Boubé Adamou, an archaeologist at the Institute for Research in Human Sciences who, as one of Niger’s foremost experts on excavations, helped lead this most recent expedition. …

“In a convoy speeding through the desert last fall, the team of about 20 found themselves massively outnumbered by scores of armed men riding in machine gun-mounted trucks. Those were just their guards, determined to keep this modern-day Saharan caravan safe from smugglers or bandits roving the dunes. …

“The team, composed of researchers and students from the United States, Niger, and Europe, went to three dig sites over three months. By the time they finished in December, they had unearthed everything from an Ouranosaurus with a 25-foot-long, bony ‘sail’ across the length of its back to the 6-foot thigh bone of a long-necked sauropod. …

“The vast expanses of Niger were [once] anything but dry, as rivers, wetlands, and lakes stretched across what researchers called the Green Sahara, home at one point to dinosaurs, and later, ancient human civilizations with embalming techniques that predate the Egyptians – relics of which were also found on the fall expedition. …

“It’s easy to see why Niger remains off the beaten path for paleontologists, despite its riches. As one of the poorest nations on Earth, it combines rough infrastructure with harsh desert conditions.

“But even if the Green Sahara is a thing of the past, the desert today is anything but desolate. Local nomads who’ve long mastered the difficult terrain have become key to conducting paleontology there, spotting bones and leading expeditions through otherwise unnavigable desert expanses. While the pandemic held Dr. Sereno’s team at bay, nomads kept a watchful eye on the carefully buried treasures, texting him updates. …

“Niger Heritage is a project drawn up by Dr. Sereno, Mr. Adamou, and coterie of international and Nigerien researchers and government officials. It envisions two museums [with] the capacity to not just display the fossils but also, for the first time, conduct homegrown research. …

“Niger’s first paleontologists, it is hoped, might be in undergraduate courses right now. With the right guidance and funding – to do Ph.D. programs outside the country – they could start correcting the lopsided nature of paleontology, where resources and opportunities are concentrated in rich countries.”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall. Subscriptions encouraged.

Read Full Post »

Accidental Paleontologists

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 10, 2022| 3 Comments »

Photo: Tadek Kurpaski.
A sauropod at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Who doesn’t love a dinosaur — at least, now that dinosaurs are extinct? Wouldn’t it be fun to discover evidence of one like the people in today’s story? At the Washington Post, Dave Kindy reports that In recent years, a number of major dinosaur finds have occurred by happenstance.

“A diner sitting in the outdoor courtyard of a small restaurant in China’s Sichuan province happened to look down at the ground and spot something unusual. It appeared to be a dinosaur footprint.

“[In July], Chinese paleontologists confirmed that the diner was right. The depressions had in fact been left by two dinosaurs. …

“Using a 3D scanner, scientists determined that the tracks were made by sauropods — large herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and four legs. According to Lida Xing, a paleontologist at China University of Geosciences who led the team investigating the site, these footprints were probably made by the species Titanosauriformes. The footprints are about 22 inches long on average, and the dinosaurs probably measured about 26 feet long and weighed more than 2,000 pounds, Xing told the Washington Post.

“While not an everyday occurrence, the discovery of dinosaur footprints happens on occasion in China — just not in urban environments.

“ ‘Sauropod tracks are not rare in Sichuan Basin … but they are very [rarely] found in restaurants in downtown,’ Xing said in an email. …

“But this wasn’t the first accidental discovery of dinosaur remnants in recent years. Take, for example, the case of Mark McMenamin, who was walking across the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last year. He and his wife collected stones at a construction site, then later noticed one of them appeared to be a fossil. It was, in fact, the elbow bone of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur known as a neotheropod. …

“Then there was the discovery of a well-preserved dinosaur ‘corpse,’ unearthed by miners in Canada. While excavating at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta in 2011, they stumbled upon the fossilized remains of a Nodosaurus, a heavily armored creature. … Displayed for the first time in 2017, it is considered one of the best-preserved dinosaur fossils ever found.

So complete are the remains that scientists at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta were able to examine the contents of its stomach, including twigs, leaves, mosses, pollen and spores.

“Last year, archaeologist Marie Woods was looking for clams on the beach in Yorkshire, England, when she spotted something unusual: the [footprint] of a species of theropod. A dinosaur similar to a Tyrannosaurus rex, this ancient reptile also stood on two legs and was carnivorous. It was the largest footprint of its kind ever found in that part of England, reported the Good News Network. …

“In 2011, paleontologists in China encountered a big rock with a fish fossil on the surface. They hauled it back to the lab, where it sat for about a year, according to New Scientist. Then the researchers decided to crack it open.

“To their amazement, they discovered inside the remains of a mother ichthyosaur [giving] birth to three babies. One was already out of the womb, another was halfway out, and the third was waiting for its chance.

“This fossil find altered the view of when dinosaurs began having live births. … Ichthyosaurs, which evolved from land-based creatures, proved that dinosaurs had moved on from egg-laying much earlier than previously believed.

“ ‘This land-style of giving birth is only possible if they inherited it from their land ancestors,’ one of the researchers told Live Science. ‘They wouldn’t do it if live birth evolved in water.’

“Back at the restaurant in Sichuan province, [the] owner was anxious that news of the primordial find would impact her business serving homestyle meals based on local cuisine. However, she has since embraced the media hype.

“ ‘She was initially concerned that she would attract a lot of curious people and affect the restaurant’s traditional customers,’ Xing wrote. ‘But now she understands the change and is ready to roll out some dinosaur track-themed treats.’ ”

I love the names of dinosaurs and how children can recite many of them at a very young age — their first introduction to ancient Greek. When John was five, he would chant dinosaur names to baby Suzanne to make her laugh. She thought they sounded funny.

More at the Post, here.

Read Full Post »

Long Ago, When Whales Had Legs …

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 7, 2019| 8 Comments »

Photo: Reuters

Did someone read you Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories when you were a child? My father read them to me. My favorite was “The Elephant’s Child.”

“In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk.” I loved hearing about the elephant’s child’s “satiable curiosity.” I loved the way the characters talked. The bi-colored python rock snake on the banks of the grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees spoke just like my Uncle Jim.

Recently, an article in the Guardian reminded me of Kipling’s fanciful stories about how animals looked before they acquired their characteristic traits. It was an article about the whale.

Riley Black wrote, “Whales used to live on land. This fact never ceases to amaze me. Even though every living species of cetacean – from the immense blue whale to the river dolphins of the Amazon basin – is entirely aquatic, there were times when the word ‘whale’ applied entirely to amphibious, crocodile-like beasts that splashed around at the water’s edge. This week, paleontologists named another.

“Peregocetus pacificus – as named by a seven-strong paleontologist team led by Olivier Lambert – is [a mammal] that was excavated from the bed of an ancient ocean now preserved in Peru. … This was a whale that still had arms and legs, the firm attachment of the hips to the spine and flattened toe-tips indicating that Peregocetus was an amphibious creature capable of strutting along the beach. Yet conspicuous expansions to the tailbones of Peregocetus are reminiscent of living mammals, such as otters, that swim with an up-and-down, undulating motion … different from the side-to-side swish of most fish. …

“There are two points that make Peregocetus stand out. The first, Lambert and colleagues point out, is where Peregocetus was found. This early whale wasn’t discovered in ancient Asia, like many others, but in South America. It’s the first of its kind to be found on the continent, and from the Pacific side, at that. This is something of a surprise. Clearly whales were eminently seaworthy long before they became more streamlined and lost their hindlimbs. Finds such as Peregocetus, as well as the related Georgiacetus from North America, indicate that walking whales were capable of crossing entire oceans.

“But, more importantly, Peregocetus is a reminder of what wonders still await us in the fossil record. … Peregocetus [stands] in our fossiliferous imagination with its hind feet on the land and front paws in the water. The whale certainly adds to our understanding of how and when cetaceans took to the seas, but the most powerful fact of all is simply that such an unusual and unexpected creature existed.” More here.

Read Full Post »

Revelations on Ancient Dinosaur-Like Creature

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 27, 2017| 3 Comments »

Photo: Dinghua Yang/AFP/Getty Images
This pregnant Dinocephalosaurus, a long-necked marine reptile, didn’t lay eggs but instead gave birth to live young 245m years ago.

After uncovering new evidence, surprised scientists are revising a long-held understanding of the pre-dinosaur Dinocephalosaurus.

According to a Reuters story at the Guardian, “An extraordinary fossil unearthed in southwestern China shows a pregnant long-necked marine reptile that lived millions of years before the dinosaurs with its developing embryo, indicating the creature gave birth to live babies rather than laying eggs.

“Scientists said [in February that] the fossil of the unusual fish-eating reptile called Dinocephalosaurus, which lived about 245m years ago during the Triassic Period, changes the understanding of the evolution of vertebrate reproductive systems.

“Mammals and some reptiles including certain snakes and lizards are viviparous, meaning they give birth to live young.

“Dinocephalosaurus is the first member of a broad vertebrate group called archosauromorphs that includes birds, crocodilians, dinosaurs and extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs known to give birth this way, paleontologist Jun Liu of China’s Hefei University of Technology said. …

“ ‘I think you’d be amazed to see it, with its tiny head and long snaky neck,’ said University of Bristol paleontologist Mike Benton, who also participated in the research published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Its body plan was similar to plesiosaurs, long-necked marine reptiles akin to Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness Monster that thrived later during the dinosaur age, though they were not closely related.

“Not laying eggs provided advantages to Dinocephalosaurus, the researchers said. It indicated the creature was fully marine, not having to leave the ocean to lay eggs on land like sea turtles, exposing the eggs or hatchlings to land predators.” More here.

I admire scientists for continuously revisiting accepted wisdom when they find new data. The only complaint I have about the story concerns the Loch Ness Monster, an old friend of mine. Should one really call it mythical? Perhaps the data just haven’t floated to the surface yet.

Read Full Post »