Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Scientists May Have Wildly Underestimated the Giant Dinosaurs of the Ancient World

LiveScience has an interesting story about sauropod dinosaurs.  It seems that their leafy meals were probably a whole lot more hearty, wholesome, and nutrient packed than previously thought.  This research appeared in the journal Palaeontology.  

The conventional wisdom about the big plant-eating dinosaurs, like Brachiosaurus and Argentinosaurus, is that they had to eat huge amounts of leaves all day to grow to their massive sizes. Scientists came to that conclusion in part because the sorts of plants available millions of years ago were nutritionally poor and in part because the believed the high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would have decreased the nutritional value of those plants.

But a new paper published July 11 in the journal Palaeontology suggests that this idea might be wrong. The researchers grew plants under superhigh CO2 levels like those found in the Mesozoic era (252 million to 66 million years ago, including the Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic periods), discovering that the vegetation's leaves had similar levels of nutrition to those of modern plants. [25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]

The leaves' nutritional value, tested by fermenting them and studying the gasproduced as a byproduct of that process, was marginally lower, on average, in higher-CO2 environments, but not significantly so, the study found. And some plants didn't become less nutritious at all.

Stunning Fossil Discovery Reveals a New Dinosaur With Iridescent Feathers

ScienceAlert has a story about the discovery of a dinosaur with iridescent feathers.  The new dinosaur named Caihong juji, which means "rainbow with a big crest" in Mandarin, lived about 161 million years ago in China, during the Jurassic period.  The research appeared in the journal Nature. 

"Iridescent colouration is well known to be linked to sexual selection and signalling, and we report its earliest evidence in dinosaurs," said researcher Julia Clarke of the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences.

"The dinosaur may have a cute nickname in English, Rainbow, but it has serious scientific implications."

The research team determined the possibility of iridescent feathers, coloured like those of a hummingbird, by the fossil. The slab of rock, found by a farmer in 2014, contained nearly a complete skeleton.

While the feathers themselves had long since decayed, they left impressions in the rock around the fossilised bones.

"I was shocked by its beautifully preserved feathers, even though I had seen many feathered dinosaur fossils previously," co-author Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told National Geographic.

It's difficult to tell for certain what colour the feathers were, but the fossil was so detailed that it preserved the shape of the melanosomes, the organelles inside cells responsible for pigmentation.

And when the team compared these melanosomes to those of living birds, they most closely resembled melanosomes found in the iridescent, rainbow-hued feathers of hummingbirds.

 

Savage Ancient Seas at Prairiefire Museum in Overland Park Kansas

DontMessWithDinosaurs has a post about the Savage Ancient Seas exhibit at the Prairiefire Museum in Overland Park Kansas.  It's about mosasaurs, sharks, pterosaurs, fish, and other animals found in the Niobrara Chalk in western Kansas.  The author of the post is the artist that created the associated pictures.  He's a paleoartist and worked with Triebold Paleontology Inc.  Cool stuff, check it out if you are near Kansas City this summer!

 

ESCONI Field Trip: Saturday, September 8th and Sunday, September 9th, 2018 to Braceville for Mazon Creek Fossils

The ESCONI field trips to Braceville for Mazon Creek fossils are set for September 8 and 9, 2018 from 8 AM to 2 PM. You can attend either or both days. There is an attendance limit of 40 people each day.

1. Families are welcome, but the minimum age is 5 years old. Children must be supervised at all times by their parent or guardian. Registration ends at midnight September 5th.
2. You and everyone in your party must be members of ESCONI. No membership dues will be accepted at the field trip site. Have your membership status resolved before the trip, no later than September 5th. You can pay dues by mailing a check, or with a credit card using the PayPal link on the ESCONI website.
3. You will be required to sign-in at the collecting site. By signing, you agree to follow the ESCONI Code of Ethics and Conduct (available on the ESCONI website) and agree to the conditions set forth in the ESCONI Accident Waiver and Release of Liability Form (sent by email to those that sign up). You don’t need to print it out, just know what you’re agreeing to.
4. You’re going to be digging in dirt and mud – dress accordingly! You may want to bring a shovel, pickaxe, trowel, or hammer. Use only a rock hammer, not a claw hammer or roofing hammer. If you decide to hammer on something, use eye protection. There may also be insects and poison ivy. Hard hats are not required. Bring a bucket to carry your fossils in. Gloves are strongly recommended. The collecting site is an old spoil pile on private property. There may be old rusty tools or other iron pieces embedded in the pile. Sliding down the hill could be very painful.
5. The top of the pile is unstable and not safe to stand on. Do not go above the flags/caution tape markers. Anyone found above the markers will be asked to leave and may not be allowed to sign up for future field trips.
6. Sign up for the trip by sending me (Dave) an email with your name, the number of members attending and the day you are attending. I will acknowledge by return email within 24 hours. If you don’t hear from me in that time, send it again! My email is [email protected]

Meet at 8 AM at the entrance to the collecting site on S Berta Road, just east of the intersection with Division St (Braceville IL). A nearby landmark for driving directions is the Braceville Gardner Cemetery, 7295 East Braceville Road, Braceville. I can send a small map to anyone that needs it.

 

Discovery of 'First Giant' Dinosaur Is a Huge Evolutionary Finding

Livescience has a story about the discovery of the "First Giant" dinosaur in Argentina.  This, the earliest sauropodomorph, lived about 215 million years ago in the Triassic period.  Ingentia prima, which means "first giant in Latin - weighted about 11 tons and was 32 feed long.  All the details were published in a paper in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"This new discovery was a pleasant surprise, and I think it's one of the most important dinosaur finds of the last few years," Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "These new fossils force us to rethink when, and how, dinosaurs got so enormous."

Paleontologists used to think that the first giant dinosaurs evolved during the early Jurassic period, which lasted from 199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago, after supervolcanoes erupting from the fragmenting cracks of the supercontinent Pangea caused a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic, Brusatte said.

"But this discovery changes that simple story," he said. I. primaand other lessemsaurids (large dinosaurs from the late Triassic that all belong to the sauropod group) that the researchers studied "tell us that at least some dinosaurs were able to attain huge sizes during the latest part of the Triassic, before the extinction," Brusatte said.

We Have Probably Been Imagining Pterosaurs All Wrong

Atlas Obscura has an article about pterosaurs.  Good background information and a discussion of a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  It seems someone(s), Armita R Manafzadeh and Kevin Padian, mapped the ligament constraints on hip mobility of extinct ornithodirans (pterosaurs).  It seems that it is very unlikely that pterosaurs flew with they legs stretched out behind them.  Check out the paper or more details.

PICTURE A CLASSIC CRETACEOUS SCENE. Sure, you’re a bit too late to have caught it in person, but if you’ve seen a kid’s book lately, you know the one. Broad-leafed plants cover the landscape. Triceratops graze, and velociraptors sneak around. Above everything flaps a flock of pterosaurs, their wings spread wide and their legs akimbo.

It’s a nice view. But according to a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, at least one detail is almost certainly off: Pterosaur legs simply didn’t bend that way. By pinpointing the range of motion of more contemporary animals, researchers have narrowed down how flexible these prehistoric flyers were, and weren’t.

When the first pterosaurs were found, in Bavaria in the late 1700s and early 1800s, “people thought they were reptilian bats,” says Armita Manafzadeh, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the paper’s lead author. “The first drawings of them that came out, both scientifically and to the public, were extremely bat-like.”