Feathered Dinosaurs: Sinornithosaurus

 (derived from a combination of Latin and Greek, meaning 'Chinese bird-lizard') is a genus of feathered dromaeosaurid dinosaur from the early Cretaceous Period (early Aptian) of the Yixian Formation in what is now China. It was the fifth non–avian feathered dinosaur genus discovered by 1999.

 
Sinornithosaurus was discovered by Xu Xing, Wang Xiaolin and Wu Xiaochun of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of Beijing. An almost-complete fossil with feather impressions, was recovered from Liaoning Province, China, in the Yixian Formation; the same incredibly rich location where four dinosaurs with feathers were discovered previously

Eastgate: Energy Efficient, But Greater Savings Possible

Photograph by Ken Wilson-Max, Alamy

The Eastgate complex in Harare, Zimbabwe, which opened in 1996, drew inspiration for its construction from the termite mounds that litter the African nation's rural countryside.

The first building to use passive cooling so fully, the Eastgate building's cooling system cost a tenth of conventional systems and uses 35 percent less energy than similar buildings in Harare. It works by absorbing heat into the walls of the building during the day, then using fans to pump the heat into the interior of the building at night.

But in the 20 years since the Eastgate building was designed, biologists have learned more about how a termite mound works, said biology professor Scott Turner, at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York.

"The Eastgate center was built upon a model of termite mound function that's been the standard model for about 50 years, and that model is almost entirely incorrect," Turner said. While he concedes that the building is "very effective," studying how termites actually move air around (which is more like the inhale-exhale cycle of a lung than a one-way wind tunnel) could "open up a whole new set of interesting ways of capturing wind to control climate." Concrete walls built with small pores could capture gentle breezes and funnel their energy into buildings' existing ventilation systems, he said.


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Feathered Dinosaurs?!

Dinosaurs' Living Descendants

China's spectacular feathered fossils have finally answered the century-old question about the ancestors of today's birds

• By Richard Stone
• Photographs by Stefen Chow

A key Chinese discovery was a primitive bird called Confuciusornis, identified by Zhou Zhonghe.



Discoverer of more dinosaur species than any other living scientist, Xu Xing, with a cast of parrot-faced Psittacosaurus, says some dinosaurs have birdlike traits, including feathers.

Some paleontologists now say Archaeopteryx may have been a feathered non-avian dinosaur.







One of the most unexpected Chinese fossils in Microraptor. It had four feathered limbs and almost certainly could fly. But unlike birds, it did not escape extinction.





The Yixian Formation also yielded Sinosauropteryx, the first physical evidence of a feathered dinosaur.






Some dinosaurs engaged in distinctly birdlike behaviors, such as nesting and brooding. Shown here is a partially reconstructed Oviraptor fossil from Mongolia with 20 eggs.



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Nature Yields New Ideas for Energy and Efficiency: Termite Temperature Control

Photograph by Monica Rua, Alamy

A termite mound is like a miniature city, housing as many as a few hundred thousand termites in its above- and below-ground tunnels. And the insects manage to keep their home at a relatively stable temperature. Why not learn from the insects to keep human buildings just as comfy?

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Digging for Dragons — Dong Zhiming

Dong is among the most successful dinosaur hunters in the world, and has helped to uncover the scientific treasure trove of dinosaurs that lay hidden under the badlands of western and central China.

Thousands of years ago, the people of China first discovered huge bones in their fields. They assumed that the bones came from dragons, the source of rain and good luck in Chinese traditional thought. Many of the "dragon bones" were ground up and used as medicine -- a practice that continues to this day in some areas of China.

Today, however, the traditional pharmacists have competition for dragon bones.

Chinese paleontologists like Dong Zhiming are recovering precious fossils that show the links between dinosaurs and birds, offer clues about the social behavior of dinosaurs, and provide insight into dinosaur parenting techniques. Who knows what the dragons of China will teach us next?

Paleontologist: Dinosaur hunter Dong Zhiming

Unearthing China's Real Dragons

 
Dong Zhiming, 26, walked atop a low cliff of red and yellow sandstone in China's Xinjiang autonomous region, his eyes scanning the ground. He was oblivious to the intense summer heat and the desolate, even forbidding landscape of this corner of the region, some 180 miles from the city of Ürümqi. To the young paleontologist it represented rich hunting grounds for one of the world's rarest treasures — dinosaur bones.

This was his first expedition, and he'd already spotted fossils of prehistoric fish and amphibians, but he had yet to discover any remains of the creatures that most fascinated him. He knew that even experienced field paleontologists could spend months on a dig without uncovering anything significant. Nevertheless, Dong felt strangely confident. He scanned the baked earth for a telltale sign — an unusual mounding of the landscape, an odd protuberance.

Dong and six colleagues from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing had set out from camp after breakfast. A half-hour later they'd halted their truck in the barren stretch he now searched. Then he saw it. Halfway down the slope was a dark, rounded shape like the rim of a buried football.

Looks interesting, Dong thought. Maybe ... Carving out steps with his hammer, he climbed down and carefully loosened debris around the object. I was right! he thought. "It's a big one!" he shouted to an IVPP technician. By late afternoon, they had excavated a vertebra from a sauropod, the most gigantic of dinosaurs, whose members include the Brontosaurus (=Apatosaurus).

China's Mr Dinosaur

Since that day in 1963, the man National Geographic Science Editor Rick Gore calls "China's Mr. Dinosaur" has found countless other fossils. Now head of IVPP dinosaur research, Dong is acclaimed as the world's most prolific dinosaur hunter. According to Peter Dodson, vice-president of The Dinosaur Society, Dong's finds include 18 new genera, or groups of species, three more than his closest competitor. His discoveries have shed light on dinosaur evolution and focused attention on China as a preeminent place to study the creatures.

Dong's fascination with dinosaurs began early. He was born in 1937 in the east coast town of Weihai. His father was a bus controller, his mother a housewife. As a child, he found no outlet for his surging energy in the classroom but loved the outdoors, especially running, swimming and fishing. Then when he was 13, he saw an exhibit about dinosaurs, which the Chinese call konglong — "terrible dragons." But unlike the dragons of mythology, he learned, dinosaurs were real. On display was a five-foot leg bone of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed plant-eater. It had an electrifying effect on the boy. He began searching out everything he could read about dinosaurs. Over the next decade he learned that China is incredibly rich in fossils; its valleys and flood plains preserved them from erosion, enabling them to weather the ages.

After Dong graduated from university with a biology degree in 1962, he entered the IVPP. Director Yang Zhong-jian, called the father of Chinese vertebrate paleontology, had studied in Munich, then worked in China alongside Western colleagues until 1949, when the Communists came to power and cooperation with the West ended. Now too old to do much fieldwork, he wrote papers, supervised research and taught, hoping for a promising student to carry on his dinosaur work.

Meeting Dong for the first time, Yang asked the alert, strongly built youth, "What do you want to study?" He expected it to be small fossils, which are easily carried and scrutinized in the lab. Dong replied, "Dinosaurs."

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Reader's Review: A Spellbinding Adventure Told by a Master ...

I recently finished reading "Fossil River", a thriller set in the not-to-distant future. An oil starved USA finds massive hidden oil reserves in a pristine Alaska wilderness. There's only one big problem, the area is fiercely guarded by intelligent, ferocious, flying dinosaurs. Jock Miller's research on dinosaurs really set the mood for an educated science fiction read. Miller's gripping narrative combines knowledge about oil exploration, environmental issues, military deployments, weaponry, chain of command as well as more gentle sensibilities about family emotions and second chances for love. The characters are engrossing. The action sequences kept me up much later than I had planned. This is a first rate fiction in the tradition of Michael Crichton and Ken Follett. I eagerly await Jock Miller's next saga. 

~ Michael Fairchild, professional photographer

The Strange Lives of Polar Dinosaurs

How did they endure months of perpetual cold and dark?

• By Mitch Leslie
• Smithsonian magazine

Not just warm-weather creatures, dinosaurs (hypsilophodonts), in fact, survived icy winters in southeastern Australia 100 million years ago, when the continent was close to the South Pole. (Peter Trusler)

Think "dinosaurs" and you probably conjure up behemoths trudging through sweltering swamps or torrid tropical forests. But ... scientists working in Australia, Alaska and even atop a mountain in Antarctica have unearthed remains of dinosaurs that prospered in environments that were cold for at least part of the year. Polar dinosaurs, as they are known, also had to endure prolonged darkness—up to six months each winter. "The moon would be out more than the sun, and it would be tough making a living," says paleontologist David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins University.

The evidence that dinosaurs braved the cold—and maybe scrunched through snow and slid on ice—challenges what scientists know about how the animals survived.  ...  paleontologists are filling in the picture of how these animals lived and what their environments were like. Recent research might also shed light on two of the most disputed questions in paleontology: Were dinosaurs warmblooded? And what killed them off?

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Reader's Review

A blazing good read. Couldn't put it down. Great action scenes. A fantasy thriller, of course, but once you permit the premise of living fossils, it all falls in place. 

~  Michael L. Lindvall

Taking a Dinosaur's Temperature

Leaellynasaura

Polar species heat up one of paleontology's great debates

• By Mitch Leslie
• Smithsonian magazine

Timimus

Coldblooded or warmblooded? Paleontologists have tussled for more than 100 years over which camp dinosaurs belong in. The balance of evidence swings back and forth. "This is Friday, so I'll be on the side of endothermy [warmbloodedness]," says paleontologist David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins University. "But if you ask me on Tuesday, I won't be."

According to David Fastovsky of the University of Rhode Island, polar dinosaurs support the idea that dinosaur metabolism differed from that of modern reptiles. You just don't see reptiles in frigid climates today, he observes. Terrestrial reptiles reach massive dinosaur scale—the 25-foot anacondas and 20-foot crocs—only in the tropics. Alaska has, at most, garter snakes.

The evidence does favor warmbloodedness for some dinosaurs, says Museum Victoria's Tom Rich, who contributed to the debate by sawing pieces off two precious Australian specimens and sending them to the South African Museum in Cape Town. There, Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan scrutinized the Timimus and Leaellynasaura samples for lines of arrested growth, or LAGs, dark streaks visible when you look at a bone's cross-section under the microscope. Like tree rings, LAGs indicate that growth ceased temporarily. Modern reptiles that dwell in seasonal environments show LAGS, as do mammals that hibernate, but birds and other mammals typically don't.

Chinsamy-Turan found that Timimus had LAGS but Leaellynasaura didn't. Their absence doesn't prove that Leaellynasaura was warmblooded, and their presence in Timimus doesn't mark it as definitely coldblooded. But the disparity between the species indicates that they coped with cold in different ways, Rich notes. Timimus probably hibernated away the dark, chilly months, perhaps by taking refuge beneath vegetation or even underground—a strategy used by many coldblooded animals. (In Montana, paleontologists recently discovered the fossils of burrowing dinosaurs that perished in tunnels, giving credence to the hibernation notion.) In contrast, Rich speculates, Leaellynasaura remained active all winter, even if snow fell and ice sealed rivers and creeks; the animals could nibble leaves of the evergreens that predominated in the region, and they might have kept warm with a layer of fat.

There might be a happy medium, after all. Metabolically speaking, the animals might have fallen between today's lizards and mammals, says Fastovsky. If dinos weren't like today's ectotherms or endotherms, he says, that would explain why researchers have had such a hard time fitting them into either category.

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Steve Carell & James Gandolfini To Star In HBO Movie About Feuding Paleontologists

By NELLIE ANDREEVA

After recently co-starring together in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Steve Carell and James Gandolfini are reuniting for another comedic movie, this time on TV. Carell and Gandolfini are set to star and executive produce HBO Films‘ Bone Wars. The project, now in development, is based on the real-life Bone Wars (aka the Great Dinosaur Rush) between Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of the 

Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Set during the post-Civil War birth of American science, the film is a sophisticated comedy about one of history’s most notorious feuds — the great dinosaur fossil race between paleontologists Marsh (Gandolfini) and Cope (Carell) — a decades-long competition that led to the discovery of more than 160 dinosaurs and their mutual downward spiral.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

 
This pedal-to-the-metal speculative thriller revolves around the discovery of a highly territorial colony of predatory dinosaurs in Alaska that has survived undetected for millions of years.

The story begins in an America on the verge of collapse: The nation’s oil reserve is almost gone, and, within a matter of weeks, the country’s entire infrastructure could crumble. However, scientists have discovered the largest fossil fuel deposit in the world, within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve, which could save the nation from imminent disaster. But there’s one major drawback: a large colony of vicious birdlike dinosaurs (classified as Deinonychus) that have lived in the secluded area for millennia. Zoologist Scott Chandler and his ex-girlfriend Kimberly Fulton, a pre-eminent paleontologist, are tasked by the president of the United States himself to help identify and somehow suppress the mysterious predators—– but an overzealous military presence turns the volatile situation into an all-out blood bath, as dozens of Marines enter the “lost world,” and none return alive. When Fulton’s wayward son and his girlfriend venture into the area, Chandler and Fulton are forced to attempt a desperate rescue.

The narrative features well-developed characters, a plausible and well-researched premise, vivid description and brisk pacing throughout. The only two significant criticisms are that the conclusion is somewhat predictable, and the overall concept isn’t particularly original; James Robert Smith’s The Flock (2006), for example, features a very similar setup. That said, readers who like intelligently written thrillers, à la Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) and Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2006), will likely enjoy this pulse-pounding trip into the Alaskan wilderness.

An undeniably readable thriller with breakneck pacing and jaw-dropping action sequences.

Dolphin deaths still high after Gulf oil spill, environmentalists say

Dolphin deaths and sea turtle strandings in the waters affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill continue to occur at elevated rates nearly three years after the disaster, environmentalists said in a new report Tuesday.

The National Wildlife Federation report asserted that while the response by BP and other officials to date has been focused on cleaning up visible oil, little has been done to repair the damage caused to marine life and their food chain.

“Despite the public relations blitz by BP, this spill is not over,” David Muth, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Mississippi River Delta Restoration Program, said in a statement.

... BP said in a statement that it has done plenty to clean up the Gulf over the last three years and protect wildlife.

“No company has done more, faster to respond to an industrial accident than BP did in response to the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010,” BP said. “As a result of our $14 billion clean-up effort, BP funded early restoration projects as well as natural recovery processes, the Gulf is returning to its baseline condition – the condition it would be in if the accident had not occurred.”  Read More

WhalePower: Seeking More Efficient Blades

Photograph courtesy Joe Subirana, WhalePower


WhalePower's product is "the first time, other than in whales and some fossilized fish, that this has been done," said WhalePower Vice President of Operations Stephen Dewar. "Everyone knew" that a blade's leading edge should be smooth to facilitate air flow, but the humpback whale proved everyone wrong.

"I did nature documentaries at one point in my career," Dewar added. "And I asked, 'What are the bumps on humpback whales for?' [The response was] 'Oh, they're just barnacles.' They weren't."

Currently, the technology is appearing in industrial fans for warehouses, where WhalePower fans move 25 percent more air than conventional fans while using 20 percent less energy, but WhalePower hopes to retrofit wind turbines with these bumps to increase energy output by 20 percent and reduce the noise associated with large turbines.



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