Jurassic Park

The largest dinosaur footprint ever has been found in Australia’s ‘Jurassic Park’.

Posted by

0


This thing is huge.

On a 25 kilometre (15.5 mile) stretch of coastline in Western Australia, there lies a prehistoric treasure trove.

Thousands of approximately 130-million-year-old dinosaur footprints are embedded in a stretch of land that can only be studied at low tide, when the sea – and the sharks and crocodiles that inhabit the region  – can’t hide them.

 What scientists found there is truly special, according to a study recently published in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“Nowhere else in the world has as many dinosaurs represented by track that Walmadany does,” Steve Salisbury, a palaeontologist at the University of Queensland and lead author of the study, says in a video describing the area.

Included among those many dinosaur tracks is the largest dinosaur footprint ever found. At approximately 1.75 metres long (about 5 feet, 9 inches), the track came from some sort of giant sauropod, a long-necked herbivore.

“There’s nothing that comes close” in terms of size, Salisbury tells CNN.

But there’s far more there than one giant footprint.

Dinosaur footprints australia

“We see a unique dinosaur fauna that includes things like stegosaurs and some of the biggest dinosaurs to have ever walked the planet, gigantic sauropods,” Salisbury says in the video.

This was the first evidence of stegosaurs ever found in Australia.

 There are also tracks from meat-eating theropods that walked on two feet and left three-toed prints with shapes similar to those many remember from the film Jurassic Park.

In this case, the three-toed prints have a special significance: in local lore, the tracks belong to Marala, an Emu man who journeyed through the region, giving laws that dictated how people should behave.

Dinosaur footprints

In a press release announcing the findings, Salisbury also describes the various other types of dinosaur tracks discovered.

“There were five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs,” he says.

Dinosaur australia footprints

The University of Queensland researchers were brought in more than five years ago by the aboriginal Goolarabooloo community, who are the traditional custodians of the area and have known about the tracks for many years.

The Western Australian Government had selected the region as a processing site for liquid natural gas, and the local groups wanted experts to help protect the region and show what was at stake.

The area was designated a National Heritage site in 2011, and two years later it was announced that the gas production project wouldn’t happen.

Dinosaur australia footprints

Since no equipment could be left out when the tide came in, the researchers used drones to map the area with digital photography and laser scans.

According to Salisbury, they have spent more than 400 hours out on the reefs.

“It’s such a magical place – Australia’s own Jurassic Park, in a spectacular wilderness setting.

Soure:sciencealert.com

Hello, Jurassic Park? Scientists create chickens with dinosaur features .

Posted by

0


Scientists for the first time have created animals with dinosaur features using fossils as a guide. They have transformed chicken beaks into something similar to a dinosaur snout.

(Reuters)

Many have pondered the idea of recreating dinosaurs while novelists and sci-fi film directors tempted our imagination with such as creations the Jurassic park film and novel series.

A research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov, have conducted a successful experiment which allowed them to create chickens with dinosaur-like features. They published their discoveries in a study in the journal “Evolution” on Tuesday.

Researchers were able to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory into specimens with a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx, according to a Yale press-release published on Tuesday.

“Our goal here was to understand the molecular underpinnings of an important evolutionary transition, not to create a ‘dino-chicken’ simply for the sake of it,” said Bhullar, lead author of the study.

‘

Thought, the embryos were humanely euthanized after the experiment, Bhullar told MailOnline that in the future it may be possible to allow them to grow into animals with dinosaur features.

Why did scientists decide to transform the beak? According to them, it’s one of parts of avian anatomy that has not been changed much in the evolution process.

“The beak is a crucial part of the avian feeding apparatus, and is the component of the avian skeleton that has perhaps diversified most extensively and most radically – consider flamingos, parrots, hawks, pelicans, and hummingbirds, among others,” Bhullar said.

“Yet little work has been done on what exactly a beak is, anatomically, and how it got that way either evolutionarily or developmentally.”

The research team also found that major living lineages of birds have a unique, median gene expression zone of two different facial development genes early in embryonic development, which the non-beaked creatures lack. When they blocked this gene expression not only did the beak structure revert into a snout, but the process also caused the palatine bone on the roof of the mouth to go back to a dinosaur-like state.

“This was unexpected and demonstrates the way in which a single, simple developmental mechanism can have wide-ranging and unexpected effects,” Bhullar said.

In 2009 Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University, proposed in his book ways of“How to Build a Dinosaur” to reactivate the DNA found in chickens, dinosaur ancestors, to recreate a small predator. According to New York Times, he was very excited to know that this experiment succeeded calling it “fantastic”.

Jurassic Park: Scientists Attempting to Revive Extinct Animals .

Posted by

0


De-extinction scientists are planning to bring long-extinct, giant creatures that once roamed the Earth back and put them in a theme park.

And no, that’s not a description of Jurassic Park’s premise. According to a tremendous cover story in the New York Times magazine, biologists started a project called Revive & Restore to bring formerly extinct animals back to life. The carrier pigeon has the most likely path to success, but the team is also working on reviving the wooly mammoth.

And where will the wooly mammoth go? Revive & Restore is already working with a Russian researcher, Sergey Zimov, who created a preserve for potential mammoth-carousing called Pleistocene Park in Siberia.

It’s not clear what the benefits to humanity will be other than an increase in awesomeness if this happens, and a variety of critics are concerned this effort will be too costly, cruel to the animals, and ultimately futile. No one has mentioned velociraptors yet.

David Haussler, the co-founder of the Genome 10K Project, talked to the Times in an attempt to quell concerns about the project. ”There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters,” Haussler said, pretty much guaranteeing he will be played by Richard Attenborough whenever the movie version of real life comes out.

Not quite Jurassic Park, but could Woolly Mammoth roam again?

Posted by

0


De-extinction scientists want to bring back vanished species by using new genomic technologies

If you thought the woolly mammoth and the dodo were gone for good, then think again – scientists in America are working to bring vanished species back to life.

Aided by new genomic technologies, biologists at The Long New Foundation in California are investigating the possibility of resurrecting creatures such as the sabre-toothed tiger.

The Revive and Restore project aims to achieve the “genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species”.

On their website, The Long New Foundation says: “The DNA of many extinct creatures is well preserved in museum specimens and some fossils. Their full genomes can now be read and analysed.

“That data may be transferable as working genes into their closest living relatives, effectively bringing the extinct species back to life.

“The ultimate aim is to restore them to their former home in the wild.”

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Steven Brand, the project’s president and co-founder, spoke about a plans to create a population of woolly mammoths in a Siberian preserve called Pleistocene Park, which was created by Russian scientist Sergey Zimov.

“We’ve framed it in terms of conservation,” Brand said. “We’re bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic. One or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success.”

But it’s not quite Jurassic Park just yet.

Currently, the project is working to resurrect the passenger pigeon, which became extinct in 1914.

Ben Novak, the foundation’s research and science consultant, told the publication that the construction of the passenger pigeon genome is underway and that the scientists hope to have reintroduced the birds into the wild by 2060, if all goes according to plan.

And there’s certainly excitement in the scientific world surrounding the possibilities.

In a paper published in Science, the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford University, argued that de-extinction ought to be pursued on the basis that it would “surely be very cool”.

However, many conservation biologists are concerned about the implications of the movement, questioning the logic of bringing back species whose environments have been destroyed, as well as the potential for creating a breeding ground for new diseases.

“We have answers for every question,” Novak told the New York Times Magazine.

“We’ve been thinking about this a long time.”

Then again, we all know what happened in Jurassic Park…