Canadian paleontologist finds new species of flying reptile

A Canadian researcher has identified a new species of flying reptile from fossilized remains found on Hornby Island off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
The fossil, a small piece of jawbone, is about 70 million years old.

"The teeth of our fossil were small and set close together," said Victoria Arbour, the University of Alberta paleontology researcher who worked on identifying the species. "It had a wing span of about 3 meters and patrolled the sky and set down to feed on the leftover kills made by predator dinosaurs of the time such as Albertosaurus."

Arbour reported on her research in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The fossil is from a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile. During the time it roamed the skies, the islands on the coast of British Columbia were about 2,500 kilometers to the south. They were part of what is now California. 


Reposted from Paleontology Network 

A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

Seeking Higher Quality Coal

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images 

China's about-face, in 2009, from net exporter of coal to net importer was "one of the most dramatic realignments" the global coal market has ever seen, according to coal and carbon market researchers at Stanford University.

This photo shows workers unloading high-quality coal from Indonesia at a custom-built mineral jetty in Fangchen Gang, Guangxi. Indonesian steam coal (the type of coal used for steam power generation), shipped into southern Chinese ports, currently offers a cheaper alternative to domestic Chinese coal transported over land, Stanford researcher Bart Lucarelli wrote in his 2010 paper, "The History and Future of Indonesia's Coal Industry."

The lower price of coal shipped by sea, not a shortfall of Chinese coal, Lucarelli wrote, caused China to look to Indonesia for fuel. And China, as an export market, "burst onto the Indonesian coal supply scene almost overnight."

The coal being unloaded in this photo will fuel a supercritical power station. Supercritical boiler systems can deliver thermodynamic efficiency around 41 percent, compared to 37 percent for subcritical systems and 48 percent for more advanced "ultra-supercritical" systems, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.


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Flying Texas reptile: World’s oldest Pteranodon?

Fossilized bones discovered in Texas from a flying reptile that died 89 million years ago may be the earliest occurrence of the prehistoric creature known as Pteranodon.

Pteranodon was a type of pterosaur that lived about the same time as some dinosaurs, about 100 million to 65 million years ago. The only reptiles to dominate the ancient skies, pterosaurs had broad leathery wings and slim torsos.

The specimen identified by Myers is an adult pterosaur of the toothless variety and while larger than most birds, wasn’t among the largest pterosaurs, Myers said, noting it had a wing span between 12 and 13 feet, or 3.6 to 4 meters. It was discovered in the Austin Group, a prominent rock unit in Texas that was deposited around 89 million years ago, early in the geological time period called the Late Cretaceous.

Key to identifying the SMU fossils as Pteranodon is a humerus of 5.7 inches, or 14.5 centimeters. The humerus is the uppermost bone in the wing and attaches to the torso. The humerus of the SMU specimen, while complete, did suffer some damage during fossilization when it became compressed and distorted through millions of years of compaction.

“If it wasn’t crushed so badly, it would be possible to determine if it really is Pteranodon,” Myers said. “These bones are easily flattened. They are hollow inside, because they have to be lightweight to allow a pterosaur to fly. So they compress like a pancake as they’re embedded in layers of rock.”

While it’s difficult to narrow the humerus definitively to a specific genus and species, some features clearly identify the specimen as part of the Pteranodontidae family, most likely the genus Pteranodon. It exhibits, for example, the prominent warped deltopectoral crest that is characteristic of members of the Pteranodontidae family, called pteranodontids, he said.

Discovered along with the humerus were parts of the elongated fourth finger that in pterosaurs forms the wing. The SMU specimen’s metacarpal — at 20 centimeters — is incomplete, missing an estimated 37 percent of its length.


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Between The Pages Book Review - FOSSIL RIVER by Jock Miller

Book Title: Fossil River
Author: Jock Miller
Buy Now Link: 
Genre: SciFi-Thriller
Page Length: 298 pages
Book Video:

About The Book:
The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

Lynda's Review:

~"They won't charge us, Scott. They're going to watch us first. Feel us out. They'll surround us, alright, but they'll stay at the edge of the clearing, waiting studying us. I know their habits, especially hunting and tracking."~ Page 164

I'm always ready to suspend reality in favor of a good story, especially one that keeps me on the razor-edge of terror. This is a science fiction/adventure story. I'm sure not all the science premise is bulletproof, but then, If I wanted science facts, I'd take a college course. There was just enough plausibility to tickle my curiosity and that's all it took to keep me reading. Nothing in this story went according to good reason but that actually made the suspense part better for me. The crazy characters didn't act or react in the most logical way, and well, aren't people somewhat like that in real life? 

Reposted from Between The Pages 

A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

A Plant to Wash Coal

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

A facility in Inner Mongolia's Ordos processes coal for burning in supercritical power stations, which require better quality coal to maintain high temperature and pressures for an overall more efficient system than conventional subcritical coal plants.

But the coal needs to be washed first, and water consumption and pollution are problems in a nation where 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations Development Program.

Energy and water are tightly intertwined. Coal-fired power plants rely on steam to turn their turbines. In general, efficiency increases as the temperature and pressure used to create steam in a boiler increases. In a supercritical boiler system, first developed in the 1950s in the United States, the water is not boiled. Rather, very high temperatures and pressures are used to decrease the density of liquid water until it becomes a vapor (steam).

But there is a constant trade-off between improving efficiency and conserving water. Some measures that cut power plant consumption, such as dry cooling, require more energy.  China's 12th Five-Year Plan, announced last year, called for water consumption per unit of value-added industrial output to be cut 30 percent, while energy consumption per unit of GDP is to be cut 16 percent.

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Century-Old Bone Wars Fossil Dispute Unearthed From University Archives

Robert T. Hill

America has seen its share of wars, but did you hear about the Bone Wars? The late 1800s found archeologists digging furiously throughout the newly settled American west in a mad dash to find fossils. This lead to fighting in academic circles, and occasionally in the field itself, over disputes that became known as the Bone Wars.
Leading the search in western Texas were geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state´s earliest fossil discoveries, writes Margaret Alle for Southern Methodist University (SMU).

Jacob Boll

Both Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud´s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to a new study by vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs. The study by Jacobs expands knowledge about Cope´s work with Hill and Boll.

The study unveils new details about the Bone Wars in Texas that Jacobs deciphered from 13 letters written by Cope to Hill, discovered in an archive of Hill´s papers at SMU´s DeGolyer Library. The letters span seven years, from 1887 to 1894.

Working for the U.S. Geological Survey, Hill not only provided Cope with fossils of interest but also shared geological information about fossil locales. Boll, who was a paid collector for Cope – as was the practice at the time – supplied the well-known paleontologist with many fossils from Texas.

“Fossils collected by Boll and studied by Cope have become some of the most significant icons in paleontology,” said Jacobs, an SMU professor of earth sciences and president of SMU´s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

The Bone Wars were financed and driven by Cope and his archenemy, Othniel Charles Marsh, during a period of intense fossil collecting. The two were both giants of paleontology with a very public feud that brought the discovery of dinosaur fossils to the forefront of the American psyche.

The two began their scientific quests as a friendly endeavor to discover fossils. They each prospected the American frontier and also hired collectors to supply them with specimens. Over the years, Cope and Marsh identified and named hundreds of discoveries and published their results in scientific journals.

Their competition, however, evolved into a costly, self-destructive, vicious all-out war to see who could outdo the other. Despite their aggressive and sometimes unethical tactics to outwit one another and steal each other´s hired collectors, Cope and Marsh made major contributions to the field of paleontology, Jacobs said.

Born in 1858, Hill was a teenager when he left Tennessee as an orphan and arrived on the Texas frontier in 1874, eventually earning a Bachelor of Science in geology from Cornell and working as a field geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Hill was the first to identify and map the distinct rock formations in North Texas that correspond to the Earth´s Cretaceous geologic period, Jacobs said. For much of the Cretaceous, a shallow sea cut North America in half from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. Dinosaurs roamed the coastal shoreline and huge reptiles swam the waters.

Through his reading of the letters, Jacobs found that Cope disagreed with the way Hill named the Cretaceous rock units, and told him so. Cope counseled Hill: “You mustn´t mind criticism. We all get it and get used to it; but it isn´t comfortable at first.”

In subsequent letters, said Jacobs, it´s apparent Hill had changed his approach, for which Cope offered him high praise: “I wish to say definitely that your discovery of the lower Cretaceous series in this country is the most important addition to our geology that has been heard for a long time.”

Cope´s other Texas connection was through Jacob Boll, a much larger supplier to Cope who ultimately made significant contributions to the field of paleontology. Boll “is mentioned, usually in passing, in virtually every history of the subject,” according to Jacobs.

Born in 1828 in Switzerland, Boll was the first to discover vertebrate fossils in the Permian red beds along the drainages of the Wichita and Red rivers and their tributaries. “The discoveries opened up an entirely new chapter in vertebrate evolution some 280 million years old,” Jacobs said. “Boll´s finds include some of the oldest close relatives of mammals whose evolution eventually led to humans.”

While Hill and Boll were linked by their relationship to Cope, it isn´t known whether the two of them ever met, according to Jacobs. “Hill and Boll both made major contributions to frontier science at an important time in American history,” Jacobs said. “They may have been nearly forgotten, but their lives have influenced much that came later.”

At least one scholar has asserted that Cope – to keep the identity of his collectors secret from Marsh – never credited Boll for the Texan´s many fossil discoveries. Jacobs, however, found evidence that in 1878 Cope, in fact, did acknowledge Boll´s contribution, at least for the big-headed, semi-aquatic amphibian Eryops. Cope wrote that the fossil was “found “¦ by my friend Jacob Boll.”

During a break in his field labors, Boll´s fascination with ancient bones prompted him to write in his native German an ode to fossils. Jacobs found the poem in the American Museum of Natural History on a label on the back of Eryops specimen No. AMNH 4183.

SMU biology professor Pia Vogel translated the poem. Vogel and Jacobs worked with SMU English professor John M. Lewis to retain the essence of the poem in English.

“Now you will with some few others
Trek to the professor´s seat.
Awakened through his careful thought,
Be reassembled from your fragments,
To tell to others yet to come
From the sculpting of your teeth
How you lived and disappeared,
Name you he will, and what he found.”



Source: John Neumann for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Reposted from RedOrbit

New Feathered Dino May Be World's First Bird

Tanya Lewis, LiveScience Staff Writer

A birdlike dinosaur from the Middle/Late Jurassic of China could be the first of the bird group.
Credit: Masato Hattori

The skeleton of a Jurassic dinosaur from China could also be the oldest known bird, scientists report.

The fossil of Aurornis xui was found last year in a museum at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou, China, long after a farmer first dug it up in the Liaoning Province. The feathery specimen represents the most ancient of the avialans, the group that includes birds and their relatives since their split from nonavian dinosaurs.

The research also reconfirms the birdlike fossil Archaeopteryx as an avialan, a classification that was challenged by some recent research. 


Reposted from Live Science

A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

Biomass to Refine Fossil Fuel

 Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Flues reach to the sky at an oil and gas refinery in Boxing, Shandong Province. A portion of the facility's energy needs is supplied by thermal energy from a neighboring biomass power plant .

Completed in 2010, the 15-megawatt biomass plant uses agricultural waste products—cotton stalks, mostly—to generate electricity for local paper mills, chemical plants, and the power grid. Although carbon is released by biomass feedstocks when burned, the government considers them carbon-neutral, because the fuel is renewable.

Hong Kong-based power company CLP Group, majority owner of the facility, noted in a December 2010 report to investors that the Chinese government has offered tariff subsidies and tax incentives "to lure investment in biomass power stations." Yet, according to CLP, "Ensuring the quality, quantity and fair pricing of feedstock deliveries is a daily challenge. The commercial viability of this project is thus fragile, even with tariff support."

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'Fuzzy' Dinosaur Discovery Provokes Frustration

by Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer  

Artist’s impression of a group of Yutyrannus and two individuals of the smaller Beipiaosaurus.
Credit: Brian Choo

Enormous, predatory, and a cousin to the iconic T. rex — the discovery of the 30-foot (9.1-meter) Yutyrannus huali was the sort that should have elated dinosaur lovers.

But news that the beast sported "fuzzy" feathers sparked outcry from traditionalists, notes the Smithsonian Magazine's blog Dinosaur Tracking.

Until this discovery was announced in early April, feathers were generally associated with smaller and more birdlike dinosaurs, according to the post. But the paleontologists who analyzed fossil remains of the newly discovered dinosaur, whose name means "beautiful feathered tyrant," found evidence of fuzz. 


Reposted from Live Science

 

Energy Sources: Generator

The early days of electric power are long behind us, but the principles remain the same: spin a wheel, add a magnet, and you can create an electricity machine -- a generator.

Pterosaur's Wing, "Hairs" Unlike Any Living Animals'

By literally shining new light on a Chinese pterosaur fossil, researchers have found that the membranes in the creature's wings contain a complex pattern of fibers not found in any living animal.

The membrane structure may have given some pterosaur species better control when they took to the skies, a new study says.

The fibers "would have made it easier to make subtle adjustments of the wing membrane when flying, perhaps giving them better flight capability," said study co-author Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist at Brazil's Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro.

The well-preserved fossil also included hairlike fibers quite different from the hair on modern mammals.

Similar fibers had been found on pterosaurs before, but researchers had wondered if they were simply products of tissue decay.

The newly examined pterosaur has the hairlike fibers all over its body and part of its wings. This suggests that the fibers were a covering that may have helped the pterosaurs control their body temperatures, Kellner said

Found in a slab of Chinese shale loaded with ancient crustaceans and ash, this 135-million-year-old fossil has some of the best preserved soft tissue yet found in a pterosaur, researchers said in an August 2009 study.

New analysis of the creature's wings has shown that it had uniquely complex wing membranes and a covering of fibers quite different from the hair on modern mammals.

Photograph courtesy Alexander Kellner

A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

 Mining An Enormous Reserve

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Trucks haul coal from an open cast mine located in Ordos, in the mountains of Inner Mongolia, the top coal-producing region in China.

Smith recalls his initial "sheer disbelief" at the scale of the energy complex he set out to photograph. "The myriad infrastructure, mines, railways, highways, and construction that was being installed or enlarged dominated the landscapes I visited," he says. After he began to understand the work ethic, pride, and engineering expertise his Chinese hosts brought to the enterprise, he gained a deeper understanding.

"Rather than question the figures, or the strict and rapid construction deadlines, it became more natural for me to remind myself that I was deep within China," he says. "Direct comparisons to the Western speed or scale of implementation feel quite futile now."

Sometimes, though, China has struggled to keep up with the pace of its own energy development. In 2010, when an epic traffic jam sprawled across 75 miles (120 kilometers) of Inner Mongolia's northeastern roadways, as many as 10,000 trucks transporting coal from this sparsely populated region to power plants in the rest of China became stuck in the gridlock.

And there have been conflicts between the new energy vanguard and the nomadic herders who once dominated the region. Hundreds of ethnic Mongolians, who now make up only 21 percent of the population in their traditional homeland, joined protests last spring following the death of a herder who had attempted to block the path of a coal truck driven by a Han Chinese man. Convicted of hitting the herder and dragging him for more than 325 feet feet (100 meters) with his truck, the driver was executed in August.


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Pterosaurs—Lords of the Ancient Skies

Parallel fibers that stiffened a pterosaur's wing membrane—each just two-thousandths of an inch (0.05 millimeters) thick—are visible in this fossil of a Rhamphorhynchus. The fossil was found in Germany's Solnhofen limestone beds, where incredibly fine grain preserves minute details.


... "Pterosaurs were just the coolest things that were ever in the air," says Padian. "They were the first vertebrates to fly. They did it long before birds and bats. And it terms of size, they pushed the envelope as far as it could go for a flying animal."

Like their cousins the dinosaurs, pterosaurs stand out as one of evolution's great success stories. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 215 million years ago, and thrived for 150 million years before going extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. Their endurance record is almost inconceivable compared with the span of humans, whose ancestors started walking upright less than four million years ago. Uncontested in the air, pterosaurs colonized all continents and evolved a vast array of shapes and sizes. Of more than 120 named species, the smallest pterosaur measured no bigger than a sparrow; the largest reached a wingspan of nearly 40 feet (12 meters), wider than an F-16 fighter.

Until recently most paleontologists would not have put pterosaurs in the same league as birds in terms of flying ability. Because pterosaurs were reptiles, generations of scientists imagined that these creatures must have been cold-blooded, like modern snakes and lizards, making them awkward aerialists at best.

In the past three decades, however, a surge of fossil discoveries around the globe has prompted researchers to reexamine their views. The emerging picture of pterosaurs reveals that they were unlike any modern reptile. From a fossil discovered in Kazakhstan, paleontologists suspect that pterosaurs had a hairlike covering, perhaps akin to fur. If so, this detail provides evidence of a high-revving, warm-blooded physiology that could sustain the kind of exertion needed to stay in the air. Judging from the skulls of other fossils, scientists reason that many pterosaurs were gifted air-borne predators, built to feed on the wing. They darted after insects, dive-bombed for fish, and soared hundreds of miles over open ocean on extended hunting expeditions.

Scrubbing the Skies

Pulling CO2 back out of the air might be easier than building jets and cars that don’t emit it.
 

Every time you drive to work, or worse yet, fly on a plane, the vehicle emits carbon dioxide that will stay in the atmosphere, warming the planet for thousands of years. Does it have to? Trees can take CO2 back out again—but even covering the planet with forests wouldn’t solve our problem, and there would be an awful lot of wood to preserve. (If allowed to rot or burn, trees release their carbon again.) Physicist Klaus Lackner thinks he has a better idea: Suck CO2 out of the air with “artificial trees” that operate a thousand times faster than real ones.

They don’t exist yet, and when they do, they probably won’t look like real trees. But in Lackner’s lab at Columbia University he and colleague Allen Wright are experimenting with bits of whitish-beige plastic that you might call artificial leaves. The plastic is a resin of the kind used to pull calcium out of water in a water softener. When Lackner and Wright impregnate that resin with sodium carbonate, it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. The extra carbon converts the sodium carbonate to bicarbonate, or baking soda.

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