Ostrich Dinosaurs

The ostrich-like dinosaurs that roamed the Earth millions of years ago were adorned with feathers, used to attract a mate or protect offspring rather than for flight.

... 
 The ostrich-like dinosaurs, known as ornithomimids, were thought to be hairless, fleet-footed birds and were depicted as such in the Hollywood movie Jurassic Park.

But the researchers found evidence of feathers with a juvenile and two adult skeletons of ornithomimus, a species within the ornithomimid group.

"The discovery, the first to establish the existence of feathers in ornithomimids, suggests that all ostrich-like dinosaurs had feathers," according to a statement from the Alberta museum.   Read more

 

If you couldn’t deter the predators with your fearsome appearance and built-in weaponry then the other option was to outrun them.

The Ornithomimosaurs, or Ostrich dinosaurs as they were also known, were tall, fast and agile, with long slashing claws on their front legs. They could run at up to 40 mph and because they lacked teeth, probably swallowed their prey whole.

Green Energy Trends: China starting to win the clean energy game

Image: China clock
Greg Baker  /  AP

Global competition for dominance in the green energy industry is fierce. Industry insiders are watching the fight and keeping score, according to Pernick. "China is starting to beat out almost all other nations on a lot of different clean energy counts," he says. Sectors where China has a leading edge include solar photovoltaic manufacturing and deployment of wind turbines. The Chinese are also players in the electric car market, a sector traditionally dominated by the U.S. and Japan.

New dinosaur called the Chicken From Hell

By Joel Achenbach, Published: March 19 E-mail the writer

Scientists have discovered a freakish, birdlike species of dinosaur — 11 feet long, 500 pounds, with a beak, no teeth, a bony crest atop its head, murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place. Officially, it’s a member of a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs.

Unofficially, it’s the Chicken From Hell.

That’s the nickname the scientists have been using. It’s the term in the news release associated with the discovery. This dino-bird is not literally a chicken, or even a bird. It’s definitely a dinosaur, and it lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, from about 68 million to 66 million years ago.

“It would look like a really absurd, stretched-out chicken,” said paleontologist Emma Schachner of the University of Utah, one of the scientists describing the new species.

“It would have been a cross between a chicken and a lizard,” said Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who excavated some of the fossils on his uncle’s North Dakota ranch in 1999

 ... “When people think of a dinosaur, they think of something like a T. rex or a brontosaurus, and when they think of a bird, they think of something like a sparrow or a chicken. This animal, Anzu, has a mosaic of features of both of those groups, and so it basically provides a really nice link in the evolutionary chain.”

(Carnegie Museum of Natural History) - A reconstruction of the skeleton of the newly discovered dinosaur, Anzu wyliei. Scientists nicknamed the bird-like creature, the “chicken from hell.”


See Mor at The Washington Post

Green Energy Trends to Watch

A meet-up of energy and information technologies

Hyundai Virtual Test Drive

Virtual Test Drive is an app that simulates the performance of electric cars as they drive a route.

In a "Jetsons"-like future, refrigerators will know when we're low on items such as cheese and beer and send a message to our GPS-equipped cell phones to remind us to pick up a wedge and a six-pack the next time we walk into our favorite grocery store — and thus prevent an extra 20-mile jaunt in our 2,000-pound car for a few items. Such a future is just around the corner, Kammen says.

"Smart hardware won't solve our consumption addiction, but it will allow us to be much more efficient," he says. "And movement of goods around is a big deal."

Kammen and his colleagues are currently matching up energy and information technologies with a smart phone application that lets people take a virtual test drive of an electric vehicle such as the Nissan Leaf or Chevrolet Volt. The app sits on a GPS-equipped smart phone and rides along with drivers in their current car. Then, the users can go online, upload their data, and learn what their energy consumption would have been if they were driving an electric


Read More

Dinosaur Feathers Perserved in Amber

 Brown Feathers

Pigmentation in these feathers gives it a beaded appearance. Pigment in the feather suggests it would have been medium- or dark-brown in color.


Read more

Turning turkey poop into power

By Ken Ronnan |

With around 49 million turkeys raised each year, Minnesota is No. 1 in the country for turkey production. And with that many gobblers comes a lot of you know what. One company has figured out how to turn all that poop into clean, profitable power.

Fibrowatt operates a plant in Benson, Minn., that burns all that turkey poo to make electricity. Plant Manager Greg Langmo explains how 100 daily truckloads of this turkey litter are producing enough energy to power 44,000 homes, as well as the plant itself.

The Minnesota Department of Energy "Fields of Energy" series explores how agricultural advances can lead to renewable energy.

Reposted from MinnPost

Green Energy Trends to Watch: Solar prices are dropping

From the rollout of sexy new electric vehicles to technologies that convert turkey poop to electricity, green energy is the source of constant hype and buzz. What do green-energy experts have on their radar screen?

Image: Solarpanels
Matt Slocum  /  AP

Prices for solar energy are dropping and will keep dropping, Kammen and Pernick say. For Kammen, the trend means that solar will finally start grabbing significant market share away from energy sources such as coal and oil — and catch up to the deployment of wind power, which itself is forecast to become as big as nuclear.

Lump all three sources of energy together, and "we are now starting to talk about more than half of our energy coming from clean carbon sources," he says, noting the caveat that nuclear has its own concerns, such as waste storage that lead to questions about its overall cleanliness.

According to Pernick, the price drops in solar — as much as 50 percent from 2008 highs — will lead to cost parity with other energy-generating technologies. "That is the big Holy Grail … and we are going to get there," he says.

Read more

Dinosaur Feathers Perserved in Amber

Coiled For Diving

 

A feather accompanied by a microphysid plant bug. The coiling observed in the feather is directly comparable to coils found in modern bird feathers specialized for water uptake and are suggestive of diving behavior, but similar structures can be used to transport water to the nest. 



Read more

Inside China's Energy Machine

Cotton Husks for Fuel

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

A cotton-picker works an industrial scale plantation in Boxing, Shandong Province. The cotton bud must be picked and separated from the dry husk. The stalks, which would otherwise be considered waste, are dried and sold as feedstock for biofuel and electricity production.



Read More

Ancient Ash Volcanoes Entombed Chinese Dinosaurs

The eruptions occurred across northern China from roughly 120 to 130 million years ago. In the study, the international team examined the ash encasing 14 well-preserved fossils from five bone beds, including the crow-size bird Confuciusornis and the parrot-faced dinosaur Psittacosaurus.

Confuciusornis

Ashes covering the fossils are fine-grained, covering charred bone, the researchers found, similar to pyroclastic ash seen in the massive 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa. The death poses of the creatures in the bone beds resemble those of other pyroclastic ash victims, with limbs extended. The bones have spiderweb cracks like those seen on the charred bones of Pompeii victims, according to the study.

  

A cast of a Psittacosaurus skeleton. Photo by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

Read More

China's Jehol fossils

The oldest confuciusornithid bird, Eoconfuciusornis zhengi Zhang et al., 2008, from the Dabeigou Formation; skeleton and feather impressions on (a) the counterslab and (b) main slab. (Courtesy of IVPP.)


A series of papers in leading international journals, such as Nature and Science, astonished the palaeontological world in the 1990s. In these, ever-more amazing fossils were announced from the Jehol beds in NE China: examples of early birds, feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs, early mammals, amphibians, pollinating insects and angiosperms. The specimens came from a time interval, the Early Cretaceous, whose faunas and floras were relatively poorly known from other locations and yet these specimens tended to be complete and they were often remarkably well preserved.

The Jehol beds are so extensive and so rich in fossils that it seems amazing that the remarkable birds, dinosaurs, and other fossils were not reported earlier.

One of the most spectacular fossils of all time from the Yixian Formation, two specimens, a presumed male (with long tail plumes) and female of Confuciusornis sanctus, a species now known from more than 2000 specimens. (Courtesy of IVPP.)

The type specimen of Microraptor gui Xu et al., 2003, a remarkable small dromaeosaurid dinosaur with fully developed 'wings' of flight feathers on both arms and both hind limbs, from the Jiufotang Formation. (a) the specimen; (b) CT scan of the skeleton, (c) reconstruction. (Courtesy of IVPP.)



Read More 

 

Ancient Feathered Friends: Images of Feathers in Amber

Simple Protofeathers

Numerous individual filaments in Late Cretaceous Canadian amber. These filaments are similar to the protofeathers that have been found as fossils with some dinosaurs. These filaments range from clear to near-black. 

"All the feathers are preserved down to micron scale, showing indentations and pigmentation," study researcher Ryan McKellar, of the University of Alberta, told LiveScience. "It’s also the first time we've found protofeathers [feathers thought to belong to nonavian dinosaurs] preserved in amber."


Read More

Fossil River Kindle Countdown - March 1st Until March 8th!

Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died. Now, in this riveting action thriller, the tables are turning!