Funky chicken

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 31, 1997

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There was a giddy buzz last October in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, photographs of a new fossil from China attracted crowds and gasps. It was the dream of many of the attendees: a feathered dinosaur.

In the early 1970s a handful of paleontologists led by John Ostrom of Yale had resurrected the discarded nineteenth-century notion that birds were the living descendants of dinosaurs-more precisely, Ostrom said, of the nimble, bipedal carnivores known as theropods.

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Superultrahyper-megasaurus

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 31, 1997

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Last October Brian Curtice announced that he had made a 100-foot dinosaur disappear. The former giant’s name was Ultrasaurus, and its remains (part of a shoulder and several vertebrae) had been discovered in the 1970s in a quarry in western Colorado-and nowhere else. Along with those remains were bones that were ascribed to another 100-foot plus plant-eating behemoth called Supersaurus. Some paleontologists have always been suspicious of the distinction, particularly since the so-called Ultrasaurus vertebrae were found book-ended between the bones of Supersaurus.

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In Times of Ur

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1997

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Geologists have long been playing a game of leapfrog back through time. In 1912 Alfred Wegener claimed that the continents had reached their current positions after the disintegration of a single giant supercontinent that he called Pangaea (Greek for all Earth). By the 1980s enough rocks had been hammered and sectioned to confirm Wegener’s theory and even to map the 200-million-year-old landmass. This success inspired speculative geologists to leap further back in time and suggest that Pangaea had been assembled from pieces of another supercontinent. They named this older landmass, which they claimed had broken up more than 500 million years ago, Rodinia (Russian for motherland). In recent years research has shown that Rodinia was real.

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Not a Raptor–a Caring Mom

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1997

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Few animals have experienced such a dramatic rehabilitation as the dinosaur Oviraptor. Its name means egg thief, which paleontologists working in Mongolia in the 1920s gave to fossils of this slender, two- legged creature that were resting by a nest of eggs–eggs the paleontologists assumed the dinosaur must have been devouring. In 1993, though, a team of American and Mongolian paleontologists found another of these eggs (they have a distinctive shape and microscopic structure), but this one was split open. Inside was a curled embryo–of an Oviraptor. Even more proof of Oviraptor’s nurturing side came in December 1995 and last April, when two teams independently reported finding skeletons of Oviraptor in Mongolia sitting on their nests.

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Shell Game

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1997

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Zoologists sometimes use the term living fossil loosely. It’s enough for a newly discovered species to belong to a supposedly extinct family or order to earn the name. Much rarer are cases of true living fossils, such as that of the Gulf snapping turtle shown below. Until 1996, zoologists thought the species had died out somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. But when herpetologist Scott Thomson of the University of Canberra was asked to identify the shell of an unfamiliar-looking modern turtle found at Lawn Hill Creek in Queensland, he naturally compared it with a snapper fossil that had been found in the same place.

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