It’s official - the asteroid did it.

A panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years’ worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, around 65 million years ago.

Thus are dominant paradigms made.

Their review of the evidence shows that the extinction was caused by a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

…and of course they’re right. Yes, there were other stressors on the dinosaurs, like disease and volcanism and so forth, but these folks are saying populations were stable for half a million years before the asteroid hit. And then you get your KT Boundary with the shocked quartz explosion signatures.

Survival of the luckiest.

David Kring explained: “I have been invited to give colloquia at a number of universities across North America and I had always been surprised by the number of people who didn’t think the connection was as firm as it was.

“I think it was very important for this distinguished panel of experts from around the world who have seen the evidence from their own geographic quarter to debate the issue and come to a final resolution. I think it is that international consensus that is so important in this case.”

Game over.

“Incredibly rare” set of complete sauropod skulls unearthed

Concerning a new specimen of the “giant Jurassic fish Leedsichthys” - some Gonzo Science themes in this find, which they are calling a “missing piece in the evolutionary story of fish, mammals and ocean ecosystems”:

Scientific anomaly:

Dr Jeff Liston, from Glasgow University, ran the excavation in Peterborough and found the new specimen to be an anomaly.

Excavate the Museums:

“We then started to go back to museum collections, and we began finding suspension-feeding fish fossils from all round the world, often unstudied or misidentified.” … One of the best preserved Kansas specimens had previously been interpreted as similar to a fanged predatory swordfish. When members of the team began to clean the specimen, they found a toothless gaping mouth, with an extensive network of thin elongate bony plates to extract huge quantities of microscopic plankton.

Revised Timelines:

“These specimens indicated that there were giant filter-feeding fishes for much longer than we thought. … The fact that creatures of this kind were missing from the fossil record for over 100 million years seemed peculiar.

“What we have demonstrated here is that a long dynasty of giant bony fish filled this space in time for more than 100 million years.”

Hmm, pursuing scientific anomalies yields fruitful results? Nobody tell the astronomers…

Now things are getting interesting:

“We think the ev­i­dence is fi­nally show­ing that these [rap­tors] which are usu­ally con­sid­ered di­no­saurs were ac­tu­ally de­scended from birds, not the oth­er way around,” Ruben added.

…University of Kansas sci­en­tists ex­am­ined a fos­sil that showed feath­ers on all four limbs, some­what re­sem­bling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its struc­ture con­clud­ed it would not have been prac­ti­cal for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glid­ed from the trees down, some­what like a mod­ern-day fly­ing squir­rel. Many re­search­ers have long be­lieved that glid­ers such as this were the an­ces­tors of mod­ern birds.

“This mod­el was not con­sist­ent with suc­cess­ful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to make a case for a ground-dwelling the­ro­pod di­no­saur to have de­vel­oped wings and flown away,” Ruben said. “On the oth­er hand, it would have been quite pos­si­ble for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have var­i­ous spe­cies lose their flight ca­pa­bil­i­ties and be­come ground-dwelling, flight­less an­i­mals – the rap­tors. This may be hugely up­set­ting to a lot of peo­ple, but it makes per­fect sense.”

I like this guy.

The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an eight-foot-long prehistoric creature.

Is 20 million years a lot?

Holy crap - they’ve reconstructed the colors of the feathers running down a dinosaur’s back:

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

…
“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

…

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

This is something like a holy dinosaur grail being discovered.

New study: feathers evolved in tree dwellers for swooping down. Like duh, right?

Some are still convinced that feathers evolved on ground-dwellers for flying up, but those people are stupid. The main reason is that it’s easy to fall down, and so one might expect evolution to hit upon ways of slowing descent, that could then be extrapolated to gliding, then flying.

The other way round, you have to think of evolution looking for a way to go up, and so you’d get … climbing.

New study out says:

Their results showed a slow decline in megafauna that began about 15,000 years ago and appeared to last for about 1,000 years.

This discovery rules out one idea that the extinction might have been caused by an extraterrestrial object striking Earth 13,000 years ago.

Like that impact did them any favors.

Pterosaur fossil “provides the first real evidence” for the “modular evolution” theory that whole groups of traits evolve at once - this would mean things evolve at a faster clip than if their traits changed one at a time.

It may be the first “real” evidence but we’ve been tracking the developing “fast evolution” story around here for a while (links to past fast evolution posts, incl. this one).

Leave it to science to jump the gun in a rush of excitement, proclaim new discoveries, then when actually thought about a bit, sheepishly retracted. Claims that approximately 1/3 of dinosaur species are probably just juveniles of other species. Whoops.

The find of an older, smaller version of T-Rex has got paleontologists in a lather. The story also sheds light on the exciting world of international fossil smuggling.

Kinda cool.

Next up: figure out how they could fly since they were so goddamn big. This is a genuinely controversial area and the expanding earthers suggest that gravity used to be weaker and that’s the only way you could do it. But even within the establishment there has been a shitstorm of controversy with some ideas that the bigger ones couldn’t fly at all, and yet with some maintaining they could. The bare facts are that the largest pterosaurs were pretty goddamned big.

What to believe when scientists disagree? Answer: Be agnostic about everything, and consider that the conservative ideas are as likely to be wrong as the outsider ones.

This guy’s throwing the gauntlet down - he’s just found the oldest dinosaur burrow, pushing that timeline back 15 million years, and he’s not so much predicting as wildly speculating, but still:

“Right now burrowing dinosaurs might look like an exception to the rule,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if more species [dug burrows]. Ten years from now it might be considered commonplace.”

We’ll check back. My guess: he’s right.

Conventional estimates of dinosaur body weight may have been greatly inflated:

…a mathematical mistake involving logarithms meant that the dinosaur estimates were much too high, according to Dr Packard’s team.

We’ll be watching this story to see if this is a solid piece of science, or if dino mass estimates are being scaled down to avoid the embarrassment of having to rejigger the theory of gravity.

Here are a handful of sea serpent classification systems.

At issue is the rest position of the long-necked dinosaurs, and as the article says, there’s “more than one way to assemble a dino-skeleton”:

….”But we can be confident that they held their heads upright.”

Many scientists, however, still maintain a more horizontal view.

And a recent paper, published by Australian scientist Roger Seymour in the journal Biology Letters, went even further.

It suggested that the creatures would not actually be able to lift their heads up to eat from high trees, because this would raise their brains so far above their hearts that their blood pressure would have to be elevated to a dangerous - possibly lethal - level.

But Dr Taylor is not swayed by this argument.

They can argue all they want, it’s all a moot point if gravity used to be weaker.

Kinda loosely-defined “tool use” I guess, but they’re National Geographic’s words, not mine. This article examines evidence that the long-extinct sea scorpion was the first creature we know of that used other sea creatures’ empty shells for protection when crawling ashore:

The odd drag marks could have been from the coiled shells of snails or similar critters, which the ocean-dwelling scorpions stuffed their tails into so they could venture above water, the researchers suggest.

Humid air trapped inside the shells might have protected the sea scorpions’ gills from drying out during brief forays into the open air—like reverse scuba gear.

“Instead of an aqualung, like you have with human divers, you have the reverse: an aerolung,” Hagadorn said.

Sounds pretty sophisticated. So let me get this straight: sea scorpions invented the aerolung?

Sounds funny to put it that way, but ever since reading this paper about bacterial cognition (pdf), nothing surprises me any more.

The new scientific paradigm regarding animal cognition seems to be: heretofore unthinkable levels of cognition are now recognized everywhere on the animal family tree.

“Fuzzy dinosaurs”

Oldest fossil brain discovered - 300 million years old. Unusual for a brain to fossilize at all. No word on the age of the previous record holder.

…At least 365 million years ago.

The fertilisation of eggs by sperm outside the mother’s body - external fertilisation - is thought to have evolved before copulation.

The fossil suggests the fertilisation of eggs inside the female’s body evolved sooner than previously thought.

Side A: Comets did not kill off the mammoths.

Side B: If comets didn’t kill off the mammoths, why are all these mammoths peppered with space debris?

Okay this is somewhat glib, as the space debris peppered Side B mammoths are 30,000 years old and the not-killed-by-comets Side A mammoths are like 12,000 years old. I just want to point out that the Side A argument does not engage the Side B argument at all, and more like shows disdain for it - I think it may be in fact warring cliques of paleontologists presenting these contrary ideas.

In point of fact many mass extinctions are looking more and more complicated with multiple causes and so on. So there’s nothing craaazy about pointing out the, well, perfectly scientific indications that comet impacts were not at all helpful to mammoths.

Pterasaurs possibly too big to fly, according to researcher. (New Scientist subscription-only story here.)

That is, unless the earth used to be smaller and had less gravity. That would solve the parallel problem of other dinosaurs being too big to exist as well.

So the mainstream scientific view is starting to warm to the idea that pterasaurs were actually land creatures, based on bio-mechanical analyses. So if those same analyses show that, say, brachiosaurus was too big to walk, the only option is that earth used to be smaller. (Our old Ripsaw column about this here.)

It’s been great knowing you all.  I love each and everyone of you beyond any words I could possibly express verbally or mentally.  I believe each and everyone of us is here for absolutely no purpose, whatsoever; and for that very reason, I consider everyone who has played a part in making who “I” am to be that much more significant.  I would especially like to give a shout out to my parents, all the friends I had growing up, my friends in the Twin Cities, and my good friends here in the Twin Ports.  When you look out at the stars at night, it’s really hard not to think about how goddamn unimportant everything we do is.  I love you.  Oh, and by the way, you can keep up on the end of it all here.

Science has proved the megalodon had a wicked bite.

[And yes I’ve given this a dinosaur tag even though it’s not technically a dinosaur.]

…The discovery could help redraw the world map during the dinosaur era, researchers add.

That’s because the newfound Australian dinosaur shows that animals could travel across Gondwana during the Cretaceous period, about 145 to 65 million years ago.

This in turn suggests that Gondwana’s Southern Hemisphere landmasses broke up later than traditionally thought.  

…Yet the Australian husband-and-wife team who led the excavation of the theropod fossil aren’t convinced by the findings.

Patricia Vickers-Rich, a paleontologist at Monash University in Victoria, said “too much is being interpreted based on a single bone.”

The Australian dinosaur fossil record is “very scanty,” she said, so “rather sweeping generalizations about biogeography are made based on very little evidence.”  

Tom Rich, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museum Victoria, echoed his wife’s comments.

He added that other Australian dinosaurs from the same period seem to be more closely allied with those from Asia than South America.

The reason for this is a “complete mystery to me,” he wrote in an email, since a map of the world of that time would show “Australia was much further from Asia than it is today.”

So this guy wants to keep his “map of the world of that time,” even though his find has basically falsified it? Spoken like a true member of the scientific establishment. Sweep those anomalies under the rug! Must save dominant paradigm at all costs!

Yeah better not admit we don’t know as much about the history of the world as we thought. Like the recent finding that the Andes grew much faster than previously believed:

This so-called paleo-elevation record suggests the mountains rose slowly for tens of millions of years and then suddenly lifted at a rate that is “faster than the commonly accepted tectonic process,” Hoke said.

How much do you want to bet both these anomalous findings support the Expanding Earth Hypothesis? Anomalies, by definition, don’t support the mainstream view. (Here’s a link to a few anomalies we’ve blogged in a similar vein.)

Here we have an analysis showing they must have hunted while walking.

missing link to whales? 

No, really…

Not really mummified because its turned to stone, but exciting nonetheless - discovered by a high school student. It’s a hadrosaur with preserved soft tissue including skin and possibly organs, plus a bonus fossil - a prehistoric crocodile that died trying to eat this thing, and they were fossilized together. Nice going kid.

They’ve found the fossilized claw of an 8-foot sea scorpion.

The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.

Curious how this seems to support the expanding earth hypothesis, since a smaller prehistoric earth would have less gravity and enable gigantism. Hm.