Monday, August 30, 2010

Dinosaurs At Questacon

At Canberra's Questacon yesterday, it was a Sunday similar to any other in the dinosaur exhibit with a firm spectacle of parents carefully gauging their kids’ responses to the huge, robotic beasts. Typically, while few kids stared up at the animals with looks of fear and surprise, others cringed under the parents' arms, frightened of the looming faces and recorded roars of the Terrorsaurus exhibition.
Terrorsaurus


It will arrive as a aid to some, then, that yesterday was the dinosaurs' last day at Questacon, before they start to Victoria. The dinosaurs to Melbourne's Science works was given by “The national science and technology centre".

Mr Kohlhagen said,"The kids will be able to get in there and raise a sweat and really physically engage with the exhibits".

The choice to give away the dinosaurs - some of which date back to 1988- has been seen with shock by parents who have relied in the past on the gripping effects of the bouncy animal movements and bizarre sounds to engage their restless kids.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Is Dinosaurs Having Brain?

pterodactyl
pterodactyl

Historians, archaeologists, and all the other historical research people researched towards the end of the dinosaur age.

What about dinosaurs, the gargantuan creatures we are all still confused with even today? Dinosaurs have no brains but what they lacked in brains they compensated with muscle and brawn.

The tyrannosaurus rex, mastodon, pterodactyl and the brontosaurus are all tradition in this field. Some believed that whatever their strengths, ultimately their unawareness or pride caused their defeat when a mammoth meteorite struck the earth millions of years ago to end their reign.


Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Research on Dinosaurs in Newyork Central Park

In New York's Central Park, as many as 100 dinosaurs could have swarming, projected a paleontologist.James Farlow and his colleagues of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne have worked out the food needs and resources of a dinosaur's  population preserved in a deposit called the Morrison formation, which stretches across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.


Dating from around 150 million years ago, near the end of the Jurassic period, the Morrison formation holds many of the long-necked giants called sauropods.The formation also holds fossil ferns and cycads, which permitted Farlow and colleagues to guess how much food was existing for Jurassic herbivores to eat.In one layer, they counted 135 sauropods specimens - including 31 Apatosaurus, the behemoth formerly known as Brontosaurus.

Calculating dinosaur appetites was faintly more complicated task because their metabolism is unknown.If they were warm-blooded like mammals, their requirements would be like to those of modern hippos and elephants - even though their larger sizes should have made them somewhat more energy-efficient.

But if they had slow, cold-blooded metabolisms like lizards, they could have survived on a much more meagre diet, and the same area could hold tens of the giants.

on the other hand, perhaps 100 cold-blooded sauropods could have crowded into this Jurassic park.The study has been available in Historical Biology.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Aussie Dinosaurs' Digs

A novice paleontologist who is an expert on a dinosaur dig in outback Queensland in the hope of finding 100-million-year-old fossils.Along with paleontologist, about 40 children and adults will participate in the dig.

The dig would hollow out a site where two dinosaurs were discovered four years ago, said by Queensland Museum paleontologist Dr Scott Hocknull.He also said that "It was Banjo (Australovenator) the most complete meat-eating dinosaur in Australia and Matilda (Diamantinasaurus) a giant plant-eating dinosaur".


The annual dig was open to the public but had been booked out,said by Mr Hocknull.He also said that,"We're bringing in people who have never seen, dug or handled a dinosaur bone in their life and training them to be modern paleontologists in a matter of weeks".

He said bone discoveries by farmers in the district were in many cases just the tip of the iceberg.The dig runs from August 15 until September 4.

North-eastern Australia has the lion's share of dinosaur fossil discoveries because of a giant inland sea, 100 million years ago, he said.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Hunting Dinosaurs' skeleton


Most recent year’s field season gave a prospect to situate at least three skeletons of this iconic dinosaur that were smoothly weathering from 65 million year old rocks at a secret location.

This is the last slice of geological time that contains the fossil remains of dinosaurs, before their mass extinction.


The research work on the Hadrosaur Dinomummy, helping dinosaurs ‘virtually’ walk, zapping Archaeopteryx with particle accelerators and tracking the enigmatic Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Badlands of Montana by the pioneering paleontologist and his team in August.


He said: “We have been working on the exceptional preservation of soft tissue and the bio mechanics of dinosaurs from the Hell Creek for over five years now, but this is our first major Manchester-led expedition to this very promising field area.”

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Guinness World Record on Dinosaurs

Guinness World Records confirmed that a dinosaur museum in east China's Shandong Province has been the largest of its kind in the world, said by Museum’s officials,

In Pingyi County, the Shangdong Tianyu Museum of Nature which was opened in 2004 is devoted to dinosaur and other prehistoric fauna, applied for a Guinness World Record in early June and received the confirmation.

"It contains 28,000 square meters (301,389 sq ft) of exhibition space, housing 1,106 dinosaur specimens and thousands of other ancient fossils," the London-based agency said in a certificate to confirm it as the world's largest dinosaur museum.


The dinosaur specimens are all represented by almost complete skeletons, including 368 psittacosaurid specimens, 391 dromaeosaurid specimens, 255 Anchiornis specimens, 22 Jeholosaurus specimens, and 70 other rare dinosaurs and unnamed dinosaur fossils .

Before the new record, the museum had five other world records, including the longest silicified wood fossil, the biggest Sinosauropteryx fossil, the biggest amethyst cave, Yin said.

A ceremony to mark the recognition as the world's largest dinosaur museum will be held on Sept. 28 at Tianyu, and officials from Guinness World Records headquarters would attend, Yin said.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

An stolen Egg Of Haudrosaur

From Otago Museum, a Fossilized dinosaur egg was stolen on Tuesday .By this morning, it was dropped off to Dunedin by police but whoever returned it didn't stick around to discuss the ancient object.

  
Senior Sergeant Bruce Ross said,The egg was left in a supermarket shopping bag at Dunedin central police station about 8am, while the main counter was unattended.
He also  said that However, the person would have been caught on security cameras, and the alleged thief was also caught on the museum's security cameras.
The Otago Daily Times reported that Staff noticed the  fossil missing from the Dunedin museum's ground-floor shop early on Tuesday, . The thief walked up to it, looked to see no one was watching, put it in his bag and walked out.
The fossil was a Hadrosaur egg from the Cretaceous period, between 145 million to 65 million years ago, and was collected in the Henan province in China.
It was valued at $1,700.
Police returned the egg to the museum this morning, and would look at the security footage today as part of their investigation
.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Dinosaurs and Mammals

Many paleontologists thought the reason the dinosaurs became extinct was that the big, unwieldy reptiles were out competed by small, nippy mammals that ate their eggs and generally ran rings around them.

This quasi-anthropocentric view, of the unavoidable rise of humanity’s ancestors, took a thump when closer examination showed that dinosaurs, too, were often dexterous and warm-blooded.

Then it was found that the extermination was an accident, caused when an asteroid hit the Earth. Until that moment, the dinosaurs had reigned supreme and mammals were just an afterthought.

An Analysis by Edward Simpson and his colleagues of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania indicates that the relationship between dinosaurs and mammals was actually that of a diner to his lunch.

Fossil teeth, and the occasional skeleton, show that small mammals were common at this time. That they should have lived in burrows is no surprise. But animals dig burrows for protection. The question is from what was this protection sought?.They analyzed the scrapings they realized that their shape suggested they had been made by the claws of predatory, feathered dinosaurs related to a well-known species called Velociraptors.

The claws of Velociraptors and its relations had up till now been regarded as weapons to be deployed against beasts of the aggressor’s own size—either other Velociraptors.

It is possible that the dinosaurs’ intentions were to build nests for their eggs, but the researchers argue that this is unlikely because known nests are of a consistent size that does not match that of these diggings.