Tag: #Dinosaurs

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Y is for Yucatan

The Big One! Asteroid impact site in Chicxulub, Yucatan. Graphic from Atlantic.

BOOM! or maybe it was boom…boom…fshhhh..whap booma-booma…boom..bubble boom glub glub Boom…

Which was it? Luis Alvarez had one story, and he was laughed out of the paleontologist’s room. Until he wasn’t. Gerta Keller, who disagreed with him, has been laughed out of the same rooms. She’s won prizes for her research. Can they both be right?

There are multiple stories here. First, there is a story of a scientist who had a crazy idea and some data, which took decades for scientists to confirm. Then, there’s a second story, of a scientist still fighting for her own version, one which would upend those decades. Plus, there’s the underlying story, of what killed off all the dinosaurs. Between story one and story two, there’s still uncertainty about story three.

It’s been called “The Nastiest Feud in Science.” It’s still ongoing, even though now they do know where the asteroid hit. The crater is in the Yucatan.

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X is for X-Ray

Graphic by riddlez46.

Cutting-edge X-ray technology is providing researchers with unprecedented insights into the ancient world of dinosaurs. On World Dinosaur Day, scientists are unveiling the hidden secrets of the Harbury Ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that inhabited Earth millions of years ago, using advanced X-ray imaging techniques and 3D reconstruction.

Scienceblog.com

They can X-Ray….

…hold on!!! World Dinosaur Day? Why have I never heard of World Dinosaur Day?!?!?!? I need to mark the calendar! I will be up in Oregon, but I will need to do something to celebrate World Dinosaur Day, June 1, 2024… stay tuned. Now, back to the blog…

They can X-ray 200 million year old fossils, oh yes they can. Those paleontologists are so darned clever!

Embryos with teeth. Blood vessels. Stomach contents. Identifying what the genus was from a jumbled mix of squished bones. Where the nostrils go! X-Rays, CT scanners, and particle accelerators are showing scientists a whole new world inside tiny, eroded bits of rock.

Dinosaur embryos too small to un-fossil, from Earthsky.org.
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W is for Wings

Pteranodon longiceps, at the NY Museum of Natural History

The flying dinosaur is a tricky concept. If you search “flying dinosaur,” you get a hundred sites that refer to pterosaurs as flying dinosaurs. But they’re not dinosaurs; they’re not on the dinosaur clade (family tree). They don’t have the right kind of hips or the hole in their head (see Letter “A”). Maybe 10% of those internet sites put “flying dinosaur” in quotes to show they at least know something, although most don’t bother (including MSN, Youtube, LiveScience and so on). Just to be clear, pterosaurs were flying reptiles, but not dinosaurs. Now that we have that out of the way, they were also cool. Just look at the bones, the arms, the wings!!!!

Meanwhile, scientists talk about non-avian and avian dinosaurs. What’s that about? Some reputable sites say the non-avians meant cold-blooded, the big giant sauropods. Others label all dinosaurs non-avian except for the one line, Avialea, that produced the modern birds. To recap, flying reptilian pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. Birds are avian dinosaurs. I would argue that makes all other dinosaurs non-avian. And one specific type of non-avian dinosaur was so close to birds that it may be considered a missing link between the two bird and dinosaur branches.

Whether dinosaurs or avian or not, their flight is also the subject of the day. How did they fly–compared with modern fliers? And what was so unusual about archaeopteryx, the fossil with a feather? I want to acknowledge right up front that I was inspired in this post by the paleontologist guru professor of the Rediscovering the Age of Dinosaurs Great Course, Kristi Curry Rogers. She specifically compared pterosaurs–those wonderful flying giant reptiles–to birds and bats, so I am going to borrow and share several of her ideas here.

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