Feathery Ostrich Mimics Enfluffle the Dinosaur Family Tree

Not only was Ornithomimus feathered, but the dinosaur’s fluffy coat changed as it aged. Lovely art by Julius Csotonyi.

Since the discovery of the fluffy Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have discovered direct evidence of fuzz, feather-like bristles and complex plumage on over two dozen dinosaur genera. University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky adds another enfluffled species to the dinosaurian ranks. Even better, the specimens raise hopes that many more dinosaurs might be preserved with their feathery coats intact.

Zelenitsky’s downy dinosaurs are not newly discovered species. Ornithomimus edmontonicus was initially described by famed bone hunter C.H. Sternberg in 1933, and it is one of the characteristic Late Cretaceous species found in Alberta, Canada’s fossil-rich Horseshoe Canyon Formation. In Sternberg’s time, these dinosaurs were thought to be scaly, but recent finds of so many feathery dinosaurs has raised the likeliehood that the “ostrich mimic” dinosaur was at least coated in some sort of dinofuzz.

... A trio of Ornithomimus skeletons have finally confirmed what paleontologists expected. Zelenitsky enthusiastically explained the details to me by phone earlier this week. In 1995, when Zelenitsky was a graduate student, paleontologists uncovered an articulated Ornithomimus with weird marks on its forearms. No one knew what they were. But in 2008 and 2009 a juvenile and an adult Ornithomimus turned up with preserved tufts of filamentous feathers. “When we found these specimens,” Zelenitsky said, “we made the link to the 1995 dinosaur.” All those strange marks on the arms of the previously discovered Ornithomimus, Zelenitsky and colleagues argue, are traces of longer, shafted feathers.

Even though paleontologists expected feathery Ornithomimus, the discovery was still a surprise. “I was in disbelief,” Zelenitsky said. “They’re the first feathered dinosaurs from the Americas, and the first ornithomimosaurs with feathers, as well. It was shocking to say the least.”

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Inside China's Energy Machine

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

China's energy use, production, and ambitions are best captured by superlatives: The country is the world's largest energy consumer, and leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.

To power its tremendous economic growth, China has called on every fuel, every technology. It is the largest producer of coal and its greatest consumer, and yet China has more nuclear reactors under construction than any other nation. Its growing appetite for oil has kept gasoline prices high around the globe. And yet China's commitment to wind and solar power is so outsized that its young industries are now among the largest in the world.

But what does China's rapidly growing and changing energy landscape really look like?

Photographer Toby Smith of London spent two years working to gain access to China's new world of energy, in an effort to capture images rarely seen in the West. He sought to document not only the sources of the pollution that darkens the skies of Beijing and other cities, but the efforts to forge a cleaner energy future.

This blast furnace within a Baogang Group steel plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is emblematic of China's emissions problems as the world leader in steelmaking, one of the most energy-intensive industries. In the past decade, China's steel industry has grown at the breakneck pace of 17 percent per year. Yet efficiency has improved since the 1990s, thanks in part to adoption of waste-heat recovery technology and a process known as top-pressure recovery for blast furnaces, which involves recycling fuel to produce electricity.

China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to use an "iron hand" to push efficiency improvements further, not least of all by forcing the closure of many small, inefficient steel mills. The country's latest five-year plan, for 2011-2015, estimates the Chinese steel industry will see annual growth slow to 5 to 6 percent.

—Josie Garthwaite



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Thomas Henry Huxley and the Dinobirds

Evolution never got much time in my elementary school science classes. When the topic came up, inevitably near the end of the term, the standard, pre-packaged historical overview came along with it. Charles Darwin was the first person to come up with the idea of evolution, and, despite the ravings of religious leaders offended at our relationship to monkeys, the idea that natural selection adapted life into “endless forms most beautiful” quickly became established among the scientists of the day.

Like many textbook stories, the story of evolutionary discovery my classmates and I were presented with was clean, neat and hopelessly flawed. Darwin was not the first naturalist to propose that evolution was a reality; many of his colleagues thought that natural selection was too weak of a force to affect evolution, and for several decades following the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, many naturalists preferred alternative evolutionary mechanisms such as large-scale mutations and internal forces driving organisms onward and upward. Darwin was not even the first naturalist to come up with the idea of natural selection. Many naturalists had previously considered it and thought that it could at best preserve life as is and at worst destroy species. (As for Alfred Russel Wallace and the role he played in the development of evolutionary ideas, my classmates and I didn’t have a clue that he existed.)

The significance of Darwin’s work was in his demonstration of how natural selection could modify life and create a branching pattern of diversity over vast expanses of time. He had worked long and hard to collect all the necessary data to support his case. There was no “Newton’s Apple” type moment—another favorite science myth—in which a Galapagos finch perched on Darwin’s shoulder and whispered the secrets of evolution to the previously clueless naturalist. In Darwin’s time evolution was a frequently discussed issue, and the debate over what natural laws drove the change in species continued long after 1859.

Almost every major figure of the emerging field of evolutionary science has been miscast at one time or another. Richard Owen, one of the first evolutionists, has been traditionally portrayed as a brooding creationist for his opposition to natural selection. St. George Jackson Mivart met a similar fate despite the seriousness with which Darwin took his objections. Charles Lyell, on the other hand, became the white knight of geology who did away with the religiously fundamentalist views of catastrophic change popularized by Georges Cuvier (yet another myth). In order to preserve any semblance of the intellectual March of Progress each character must take up their proper place in the historical drama; they must fall along a simple chain of succession from ignorance to understanding. But among the most pernicious myths are those which seek to honor past scholars for the wrong reasons.

In 1996 a single photograph caused quite a stir at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in New York City. The picture depicted a small dinosaur in the classic death pose—head thrown back and stiff tail levered straight up—but it was covered in a fuzzy coat of rudimentary feathers. Eventually named Sinosauropteryx, this creature was the first feathered dinosaur to be found since the first specimens of Archaeopteryx were chiseled out of German limestone quarries in the late 19th century. It was a stunning confirmation of what many paleontologists had come to suspect on the basis of anatomy alone—that birds had evolved from dinosaurs, and many characteristic avian traits appeared among dinosaurs first. John Ostrom, Bob Bakker and other paleontologists were not the first to support this idea. The hypothesis had once been among the most prominent explanations for the origin and birds, and many authorities credited the Victorian naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley as being the first to propose it.

Huxley is often included among Darwin’s supporting cast. He was a prominent public voice for evolutionary science while Darwin mostly kept track of the discussions and debates about evolution through correspondence. In fact, Huxley was among the first scientists to propose graded lines of descent for birds, whales and horses, but his determination of these evolutionary transitions required a circuitous process of discovery and realization. Huxley’s ideas about bird origins, especially, were not a perfect anticipation of our current knowledge, but a set of nuanced hypotheses which relied on Huxley’s idiosyncratic conception of evolution.
 
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Reposted from Smithsonian Magazine

Energy Trends: India will edge China as "engine" of energy demand.

 

Photograph by Zheyang Soohoo, Reuters/Corbis

The swirl of headlights and taillights marks the traffic flow at a busy Petrol China gasoline station. Two-thirds of future growth in energy demand will come from Asia, led by both China and India.


Meanwhile, the world's thirst for oil is not slacking. Under the energy and climate policies that nations currently have in place, the IEA expects demand for oil to increase 27 percent between 2012 and 2035, to 111 million barrels a day. Fully two-thirds of that growth will come from Asia, with China in the lead.

China will remain Asia's biggest market, but "the volumetric growth in Indian demand (between 2020 and 2035) is larger than that of China," the IEA said. "India will be the engine of global demand growth," said the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol.

Demand will also accelerate greatly in the Middle East, which will account for 10 percent of growth in energy demand through 2035. By 2035, Middle Eastern countries will be gobbling down nearly 10 million barrels of oil a day, or about the same amount that China is consuming today.

Demand in developed countries like the United States and much of Europe will actually decrease between now and 2035, largely because of improved energy efficiencies, particularly tougher automotive fuel standards.

"Fossil Free" Fossil Fuels May Lie Deep Inside Earth

by Brian Handwerk 

Reserves of oil and gas, like the puddle of Venezuelan crude seen above, are made from the remains of plants and animals buried just a few miles below Earth's surface.

By mimicking the extreme conditions found much deeper, inside Earth's mantle, scientists have created the chains of carbon and hydrogen that make up so-called fossil fuels—without the fossils, a July 2009 study says.

The standard recipe for oil and natural gas is simple: Take animal or plant remains, bury them under layers of Earth's crust, turn up the pressure and temperature, and set a very, very long timer.

But a new study suggests that Earth could be cooking up the same finished products using a few substitutions.

By mimicking the extreme conditions found deep inside Earth, scientists have created the chains of carbon and hydrogen that make up so-called fossil fuels—without the fossils.

The feat may be a boost to an unorthodox theory that Earth could hold significant amounts of abiotic, or life-free, fuels far below conventional oil reserves.

Experts caution, however, that even if such reserves exist, exploiting them commercially could pose a challenge.

Diamonds and Lasers

Most of today's oil comes from deposits found a mere three to five miles (five to eight kilometers) below Earth's surface.

But Vladimir Kutcherov and colleagues wanted to know if fossil fuels could form where no organic matter exists: the upper mantle, 40 to 95 miles (65 to 150 kilometers) underground.

For their raw material, the team started with methane—a component of natural gas—that had been previously produced in the lab from only water and minerals.

The scientists crushed the "artificial" methane between two diamonds and heated it with a laser to re-create conditions thought to exist in Earth's mantle—although with a much shorter "cooking time" than what would be needed in nature.

The lab technique created pressures more than 20,000 times those found at sea level and temperatures topping 2,240 degrees F (1,227 degrees C).

Under these conditions, the methane reacted to produce a blend of ethane, propane, butane, molecular hydrogen, and graphite. "This is not just an artificial hydrocarbon mixture," said Kutcherov, of Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology.

"This mixture is very similar to the composition of natural gas."

Lab-made ethane subjected to the same temperatures and pressures produced methane, the team reports this week in the online version of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The reversibility suggests a hydrocarbon production cycle could be at work deep inside Earth's mantle, Kutcherov said.

New Energy Source?

The study addresses the controversial view, first proposed by Soviet geologists in the 1950s, that deep Earth holds reserves of oil made from just minerals and water.

Some scientists have even suggested that material from these deeper reservoirs occasionally migrates to the surface and may help to replenish known oil fields.

Henry Scott, of Indiana University South Bend, was part of a 2004 team that made inorganic methane from marble under simulated "deep Earth" conditions.

Production of heavier hydrocarbons from methane is a "big step forward," said Scott, who was not part of the new study.

The work makes it seem increasingly likely that some abotic hydrocarbons can form in the deep Earth.

However, he cautioned, there is little to suggest that commercially important amounts of oil, gas, and other hydrocarbons have fossil-free origins.

"There is simply an overwhelming body of evidence suggesting [commercial deposits] form from the decay of once-living things," he said.


Reposted from National Geographics News

Microraptor's Plumage Could Offer Insight into Early Evolution of Feathers

 A team of American and Chinese researchers has revealed the color and detailed feather pattern of Microraptor, a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur that lived about 130 million years ago. The non-avian dinosaur's fossilized plumage, which had hues of black and blue like a crow, is the earliest record of iridescent feather color. The findings, which suggest the importance of display in the early evolution of feathers, will be published in the March 9 edition of the journal Science.

"This study gives us an unprecedented glimpse at what this animal looked like when it was alive," said Mark Norell, one of the paper's authors and chair of the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology. "There's been a lot of speculation about how the feathers of Microraptor were oriented and whether they formed airfoils for flight or whether they had to do with sexual display. So while we've nailed down what color this animal was, even more importantly, we've determined that Microraptor, like many modern birds, most likely used its ornate feathering to give visual social signals."

Although its anatomy is very similar to birds, Mircroraptor is considered a non-avian dinosaur and is placed in the group of dinosaurs called dromaeosaurs that includes Velociraptor. The fossilized specimen used in this study comes from rocks in Northeastern China that are about 130 million years old.

A reconstruction of Microraptor
based on digital overlays of nine
fossilized specimens (AMNH/M. Ellison) 

A close-up view of the well-preserved
feather imprints on the Microraptor fossil
(AMNH/M. Ellison)

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Microraptor Was a Glossy Dinosaur

Microraptor was an exquisitely feathered dinosaur. The small, sickle-clawed predator, which lived about 120 million years ago, was covered in well-developed plumage, including long feathers on its arms and legs. But we now know that Microraptor was not only beautiful in an anatomical structure sense. A detailed new study has painted this dinosaur in a glossy black sheen.  Microraptor feathers were iridescent blue-black

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Energy Trends: Fossil fuels will still dominate the scene

 
IEA expects renewable energy generation to double by 2035 under existing policies. But solar, wind, and hydropower are not on track to catch up with oil or coal, and world primary energy demand is on track to increase 43 percent.

Today's share of fossil fuels in the world energy mix—82 percent—is the same as it was 25 years ago. And by 2035, the IEA forecasts that fossil fuels will barely give up ground, providing 75 percent of global energy. 

Governments around the world subsidized consumption of fossil fuel to the tune of $544 billion last year—more than five times greater than supports for renewable energy, which totaled $101 billion in 2012. IEA expects subsidies for renewables to more than double to $220 billion by 2035, but they will still be overshadowed by government supports for fossil fuels without reform.

Unsurprisingly, given the expected energy mix, carbon dioxide emissions from energy are expected to continue their upward movement, jumping 20 percent by 2035. This leaves the world on a trajectory consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of 3.6°C (6.5°F), far above the internationally agreed 2°C (3.6°F) target. 

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Plundering Science, Bone by Bone

By ALANNA MITCHELL

The fossil of a Tarbosaurus bataar, top, was finally returned to Mongolia after it was poached and sold for $1 million. The Nemegt Basin, a fertile site, is particularly vulnerable.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

It is the dinosaur version of grave robbing: fossil poachers plundering a paleontological dig, frequently smashing ancient skulls and stealing valuable teeth, claws and feet.

Often, all that remain are shards of fossilized bone and a wrecked, irreplaceable scientific record. And in cases where poachers excavate an entire skeleton and spirit it away to illicit entrepreneurs or collectors, it is as if the bones, buried for millions of years, were being dug up only to be hidden away again in private collections.

“This is huge,” said Catherine A. Forster, a paleontologist at George Washington University who is president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. “It isn’t just one or two specimens. A fair proportion of very good fossils just disappear from knowledge, and few are ever seen again.”

And while some scientists hoped that a high-profile legal case in New York last year over the $1 million sale of a rare Mongolian dinosaur would curb the illegal digging, that does not appear to have happened. Mark A. Norell, chairman of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said a visit to the Gobi Desert over the summer made clear that poaching continues “in a big way.”

Philip J. Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta, says he has determined that 98 skeletons of the dinosaur, Tarbosaurus bataar (sometimes called Tyrannosaurus bataar), were destroyed or removed by poachers in Mongolia. Fewer than a dozen are in scientific hands, he says. And he has counted many other plundered fossil skeletons from the Gobi, including 86 ostrichlike dinosaurs. (It has been illegal to remove fossils from Mongolia since the 1920s.)

Although the age of the dinosaurs lasted about 165 million years, their skeletons are relatively uncommon: only about 3,000 are known to exist. About 1,300 dinosaur species have been identified, Dr. Norell said — more than half from a single skeleton and perhaps a third from a single bone.

Paleontologists say they are not taking aim at professional fossil finders, who work within the law and dig carefully. They are calling for the patchwork of laws on dinosaur stealing and smuggling to be enforced and tightened around the world, and they are pleading with private collectors to demand proof of a fossil’s origins before they buy — just as they would question the pedigree of a painting or an antique.

Otherwise, the scientists say, valuable entries in the earth’s book of life will be lost forever, including information about exactly where the fossils were found, what geological formation the creatures were in, how they were lying in the ground, how they were discovered and precisely when they lived, not to mention what surrounded them at death.

“I’m saying, ‘Ask for provenance,’ ” Dr. Norell said. “It worked in the art world, but it hasn’t hit the fossil world.”

The Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, a professional group representing private commercial fossil collectors and dealers, is also encouraging its members to educate themselves and the public on the legality of the specimens.

The modern-day fossil rush began in earnest after the Field Museum in Chicago paid $8.36 million in 1997 for Sue, the most complete T. Rex skeleton ever found, said Kenshu Shimada, a professor at DePaul University in Chicago who is chairman of government affairs at the paleontology society. Shortly after, the phenomenon of online buying and selling through sites like eBay took off, opening up global markets for fossils.

Dr. Shimada said the society became so concerned about the extent of the illegal dinosaur trade that it made a survey of “paleo hot spots,” gathering information from 20 countries about where fossils are, what laws govern them and how the laws are enforced.

Dr. Currie said the Nemegt Basin, in the Gobi Desert, is a particular concern. It is one of the two best dinosaur sites on the planet, he said, with a diverse range of fossils and thousands of footprints. The 70-million-year-old T. Bataar, for example, was an Asian relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, and was one of the last dinosaurs to evolve, one of the most sophisticated and one of the most dangerous — yet much of its life cycle remains unknown.

“One of the most spectacular sites for understanding dinosaurs in the world is now being destroyed by poachers,” Dr. Currie said.

The dream, he said, is to explore the basin as an ancient ecosystem, learning how dinosaurs interacted with one another and their environment. Many puzzles remain. For example, scientists would expect to find far more plant-eating dinosaurs than meat eaters in one layer of the basin, yet the remains of carnivores predominate. Why?

While the Mongolian government’s successful lawsuit over the T. Bataar skeleton did not end poaching, it has had other effects. The sale was voided, and the smuggler, Eric Prokopi, a fossil dealer from Gainesville, Fla., pleaded guilty in a criminal proceeding and awaits sentencing. The skeleton was returned to Mongolia in May.

As a result, the country has set up its first dinosaur museum, in the capital, Ulan Bator, with the repatriated skeleton as the starring attraction, said Minjin Bolortsetseg, director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs. Twenty-two more Mongolian fossils are due to be repatriated soon.

But Dr. Bolortsetseg said that until the Mongolian government protects fossil sites, involves local governments in policing them and educates the public about the historical value of the fossils, the looting is unlikely to stop. 

Reposted from The New York Times

Energy Trends: U.S. energy boom is unique, has risks.

Thanks to "fracking," the United States is reaching the top spot among world oil producers sooner than expected, and is "well on its way to realizing the American dream" of energy independence, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said.

"But this does not mean that the world is on the cusp of a new era of oil abundance," the IEA warned in its closely watched annual World Energy Outlook. Instead, the agency predicted that no other country will replicate the United States' success with hydraulic fracturing and other unconventional technologies that have led to the North American boom in oil and natural gas production.


IEA notes that there is a steep decline rate for shale oil and natural gas wells tapped by hydraulic fracturing, the unconventional technology that has been key to U.S. success. Maintaining high output will require continuous investment in drilling new wells to compensate for declines at existing ones, the agency said.

IEA notes that many nations hope to replicate U.S. success in fracking, and areas of Argentina, Russia, China, and the Middle East seem  promising. But "good geology alone is not sufficient to replicate the U.S. experience," the agency said. Outside of the United States, there's neither the legal environment nor the oil services industry capacity to make shale oil and gas development worth the cost. More than 6,000 wells were drilled for unconventional oil in the United States and Canada in 2012, and only 100 outside of North America.

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More on the Ornithomimus

Ornithomimus on display at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Ornithomimus was a swift bipedal theropod which fossil evidence indicates was covered in feathers, equipped with a small toothless beaked head that may indicate an omnivorous diet.

Like other ornithomimids, species of Ornithomimus are characterized by feet with three weight-bearing toes, long slender arms, and long necks with birdlike, elongated, toothless, beaked skulls. They were bipedal and superficially resembled ostriches. 

Ornithomimus edmontonicus in "death pose", Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Reposted from Wikipedia 

 

The Bat-Winged Dinosaur That Never Was

Pennycuick’s hypothetical Archaeopteryx ancestor, with membranes between the fingers and no feathers. From Pennycuick, 1986.

The prediction of fluffy Ornithomimus came from the spread of feathers on the coelurosaur family tree. The Coelurosauria is a major dinosaur group that encompasses tyrannosaurs, compsognathids, ornithomimosaurs, alvarezsaurs, oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs and birds. To date, evidence of feathers has been found in every coelurosaur lineage except one–the ornithomimosaurs. The spread of feathers hinted that some sort of plumage was present in the common ancestor of all coelurosaurs and therefore should have been inherited by the ornithomimosaurs, but, until now, no one had found direct evidence.

A trio of Ornithomimus skeletons have finally confirmed what paleontologists expected. Paleontologists Zelenitsky enthusiastically explains ... In 1995, when Zelenitsky was a graduate student, paleontologists uncovered an articulated Ornithomimus with weird marks on its forearms. No one knew what they were. But in 2008 and 2009 a juvenile and an adult Ornithomimus turned up with preserved tufts of filamentous feathers. “When we found these specimens,” Zelenitsky said, “we made the link to the 1995 dinosaur.” All those strange marks on the arms of the previously discovered Ornithomimus, Zelenitsky and colleagues argue, are traces of longer, shafted feathers.

But there’s more to the find than simply adding another species of fluffy dinosaurs to the list. The fact that the adult and juvenile animals had different kinds of plumage adds new evidence that coelurosaurs changed their fluffy coats as they aged. “The one juvenile was completely covered in filamentous type feathers,” Zelenitsky said. What the adults looked like comes from the two other specimens. One adult skeleton, lacking forearms, preserves fuzzy feathers, and “the second adult had markings on the forearm.” Together, the specimens indicate that adult Ornithomimus were mostly covered in fuzz but developed more complex arm feathers by adulthood.

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