Hurricanes/Tropical Storms on the Canadian Prairies???

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SaskatchewanScreamer

Hurricanes/Tropical Storms on the Canadian Prairies???

#1 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Fri Jun 18, 2010 8:58 am

well many, many, many eons ago .......

Alberta scientists discover largest bed of dinosaur bones
Find also contains evidence of ‘catastrophic’ tropical storms that routinely wiped out creatures in the area


Drumheller, Alta. — The Canadian Press
Published on Thursday, Jun. 17, 2010 9:38PM EDT
Last updated on Thursday, Jun. 17, 2010 9:42PM EDT
Scientists in Alberta have discovered the largest dinosaur bonebed ever documented – along with evidence of massive carnage – near Hilda, 50 km north of Medicine Hat.

The find covers an area of about 2.3 square kilometres and contains thousands of bones from the plant-eating dinosaur Centrosaurus apertus, according to a new book “New Perspectives On Horned Dinosaurs,” published this month by Indiana University Press.

Bonebeds containing Centrosaurus, a type of horned dinosaur distantly related to the Triceratops, have been documented in Alberta since the early 1980s, providing the first evidence that some dinosaurs lived in herds.

The new species of dinosaur, named Centrosaurus brinkmani, belongs to the group of dinosaurs related to the well-known Triceratops, but lived about 10 million years earlier. Remains of the dinosaur were discovered in bone beds in southern Alberta, the largest of which is in Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ceratopsian (horned) dinosaurs can be distinguished from one another by the ornamentation on their frills that extend shield-like from the back of their skulls.
However, officials at the Royal Tyrrell Museum say the Hilda site provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers comfortably in the high hundreds to low thousands.

“Data from this mega bonebed provide pretty clear evidence that these and other dinosaurs were routinely wiped out by catastrophic tropical storms that flooded what was once a coastal lowland here in Alberta, 76 million years ago,” said David Eberth, a senior research scientist at the museum, the lead author on the study and one of the book's three editors.

Rather than picturing the animals as drowning while crossing a river, a classic scenario that has been used to explain bonebed occurrences at many sites in Alberta, the research team interpreted the vast coastal landscape as being submerged during tropical storms or hurricanes.

With no high ground to escape to, most of the members of the herd drowned in the rising coastal waters. Carcasses were deposited in clumps across kilometres of ancient landscape as floodwaters receded.

“It's unlikely that these animals could tread water for very long, so the scale of the carnage must have been breathtaking,” said Mr. Eberth. “The evidence suggests that after the flood, dinosaur scavengers trampled and smashed bones in their attempt to feast on the rotting remains.”

The Hilda mega bonebed also helps explain why dinosaurs are so abundant in the badlands of Western Canada.

“Not only can we now explain why these kinds of horned dinosaurs are preserved in such great abundance here, but the tropical storm model also explains why there are so many kinds of dinosaurs preserved in the rocks at Dinosaur Provincial Park, the Drumheller area, and even Grande Prairie, and why they are often found preserved so exquisitely,” said Mr. Eberth.

According to the team, coastal plain floods like those that afflict modern Bangladesh, occur on a geographic scale that is so vast that they often kill large varieties and numbers of the larger terrestrial animals, regardless of whether they lived solitary lives or spent their time in large herds.

“Because of their size and the scale of the flooding, dinosaurs could not escape the coastal floodwaters and would have been killed in large numbers. In contrast, fish, small reptiles, mammals and birds may have been able to escape such seasonal catastrophes by retreating to quiet water areas, the safety of trees and burrows, or simply by flying away.”
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#2 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Sat Jul 17, 2010 2:31 pm

And in that sea lived some pretty awesome and ferocious creatures (it constantly surprises me when I find fossils of creatures that lived in the ocean that once covered the Canadian (and American plains):

Bones of giant predatory fish unearthed in Manitoba
By Carol Sanders, Winnipeg Free Press July 17, 2010
StoryPhotos ( 1 )

The bones of an 80-million-year-old Xiphactinus — as long as a shipping container — were unearthed in the Manitoba Escarpment, near Morden, Man., with the flipper of a mosasaur between its jaws.Photograph by: Google Maps, Google MapsMORDEN, Man. — A giant predatory fish that prowled the prehistoric sea that once covered Manitoba was found near here with the catch of the day in its mouth — the flipper of a huge marine reptile.


The bones of an 80-million-year-old Xiphactinus — as long as a shipping container — were unearthed in the Manitoba Escarpment, with the flipper of a mosasaur between its jaws.


The discovery was made by one of the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre's summer staff walking through a drainage ditch along the edge of what used to be the Western Interior Seaway.


"Science brings you so far," said Tyler Schroeder, general manager of the Morden, Man.-based centre. "Magic or luck brings you the rest of the way."


The specimen is about six metres long, making it the largest in the museum's collection of fish fossils.


"We'll be setting a new landmark for ourself with this," Schroeder said.


It has caught the attention of the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet, which sent a crew to the site of the Xiphactinus find earlier this week.


The centre's resident paleontologist Joey Hatcher doesn't know if the 350-kilogram fish was trying to eat the mosasaur, or was fighting with it. It's the first evidence he's seen of the big fish preying on the giant marine reptiles.


"We find mosasaurs with their stomach contents chock full of fish. But to find a fish with a mosasaur in its jaws is really amazing luck," said Hatcher.


The Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre houses Canada's largest collection of marine reptile fossils, including a 13-metre mosasaur.


The fossils are from the saltwater seaway that covered central North America in the Late Cretaceous Period 80 million years ago, not the freshwater Lake Agassiz caused by a glacier melt just 12,000 years ago.


The Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre is using the Morden Community Centre to showcase its finds from area digs while preparing a business plan and fundraising for a permanent museum, Schroeder said.


For now, there are two paleontologists on site five days a week, along with volunteers and summer staff from Winnipeg, Japan and Washington state working on undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.


Every day they're uncovering more fossils, Schroeder said.


The plan is to make Morden — located about 110 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg — the marine-reptile equivalent of its Drumheller cousin. The Alberta town has turned its dinosaur discovery into a tourist destination, and the Morden is trying to do likewise.


In the meantime, tours are available, with half-day trips and five-day dig packages. You can't enter one of the dig sites without a staff member, Schroeder said, and you can't keep what you find.


"All of our fossils are owned by the Province of Manitoba — they're recognized as historical artifacts."

© Copyright (c) Winnipeg Free Press
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#3 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Sat Jul 17, 2010 2:52 pm

Speaking of ancient creatures....one more discovery :

Dinos Torosaurus and Triceratops are the same species, scientists say


By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News July 15, 2010 Be the first to post a comment

About 65 million years after a huge, horned dinosaur from Saskatchewan breathed its last breath — along with the rest of its reptilian kin in the famous die-off that left Canada's midwest plains littered with their fossils — the beast known as Torosaurus has been killed again.


Two U.S. scientists have concluded the animal, long thought to have been a rare, bigger cousin of the well-known Triceratops, is actually just an elderly version of the same species.


If the theory is accepted by the scientific community, it means Canada's most notable Torosaurus specimen — unearthed along the Frenchman River in southwest Saskatchewan and specifically cited in the new U.S. study — would lose its classification as a distinct creature.


But as a consolation, Saskatchewan — already home to "Scotty," among the finest Tyrannosaurus rex specimens known to science — could claim to have one of the world's most "mature" examples of Triceratops.


The reclassification was first proposed at an international meeting of fossil experts last fall.


This week, in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Montana State University researchers John Scannella and John Horner lay out a detailed case for eliminating Torosaurus from the dinosaur family tree and adding the handful of misidentified specimens from various sites in the U.S. and Canada to the Triceratops category.


The U.S. scientists said their conclusions were based on a 10-year study of 50 Torosaurus and Triceratops individuals — including 30 skulls — gathered mainly from Montana's Hell Creek bonebed, but also held in various museum collections.


They found the distinctive size and shape of the decorous frill on the fossils thought to be from Torosaurus specimens really represented examples of Triceratops that had been lucky enough to survive into the late stages of life.


"It is telling," they note, "that no confirmed juvenile 'Torosaurus' skulls have been reported."


Significantly, the scientists state in their study, Triceratops' elaborate headgear continued to grow and change throughout their life cycle, creating the impression of subtly different species at different dig sites.


And the revelation that Torosaurus and Triceratops are the same species, they argue, adds further evidence that dinosaur biodiversity had severely diminished in the years just before their worldwide extinction about 65 million years ago.


"Triceratops and 'Torosaurus' were proposed to be the last of their lineages," Scannella and Horner write. Collapsing the two species into one shows "that dinosaur diversity was more depleted than traditionally thought well before the end of the Cretaceous Period."

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technolo ... z0tyFjsJcu

Our land may be flat but oh my the things to be discovered by an inquisitive eye. ;D
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#4 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Sat Jul 17, 2010 4:05 pm

And another one makes the news...

Newly discovered Canadian dinosaur had "mojo" with the ladies


By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service July 9, 2010 Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 3 )

More Images » Graphic comparing the skull of a Mojoceratops perifania to that of other dinosaurs.Photograph by: Yale University, Photo HandoutA newly discovered species of Canadian dinosaur with a heart-shaped frill on its head has been given one of the sexiest names in paleontological history — a tribute to the fact that the long-gone beast had some serious "mojo" going for it when luring mates about 75 million years ago.


Remains of the hippo-sized creature, formally designated "Mojoceratops" by its Yale University discoverer, are found only in Alberta and Saskatchewan, according to a paper announcing the find published online Friday by the journal Paleontology.


The horned frill that flared at the base of the animal's skull is described as the "most ostentatious" ever found for the family of dinosaurs known as ceratopsids.


Related to the well-known Triceratops — which also sported elaborate headgear to attract members of the opposite sex — but appearing some 10 million years earlier than its familiar plant-eating cousin, Mojoceratops is believed to have existed for only about one million years before vanishing from the fossil record.


"I discovered that 'mojo' is an early 20th-century African-American term meaning a magic charm or talisman, often used to attract members of the opposite sex," Yale researcher Nicholas Longrich states in a summary of his findings. "This dinosaur probably used its frill to attract mates, so the name made sense."


Longrich co-authored a headline-grabbing paper last month with Canadian paleontologist Michael Ryan in which the researchers documented the world's earliest-known mammal bite marks, found on 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones and other fossilized remains dug up in southern Alberta.


And in May, a dinosaur discovery by Ryan drew international attention when he named that ceratopsid species Medusaceratops lokii after the snake-haired Greek monster and the comic-book villain Loki, inspired by the Norse god of mischief.


Longrich said the idea of highlighting the new species' particularly decorous frill with a "cool" moniker came about after a beer-fuelled brainstorming session with colleagues.


"You're supposed to use Latin and Greek names, but this just seemed more fun," Longrich said. "You can do good science and still have some fun, too. So why not?"


The full name of the newly identified species — Mojoceratops perifania — includes the Greek term perifania (meaning "pride"), ceras (Greek for "horn") and ops (Greek for "face").


Longrich said he first noticed the distinctive species in a collection of Canadian dinosaur specimens held by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.


Later searches in the collections of Canadian museums turned up other Mojoceratops individuals that had been incorrectly grouped with closely related dinosaurs.


Just last month, scientists announced that the world's largest known deposit of dinosaur fossils had been unearthed near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, well east of the famous Dinosaur Provincial Park bonebed near Drumheller, Alta.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technolo ... z0tyWEEesV
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#5 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Fri Jul 30, 2010 5:59 pm

Maybe this thread should be about Canadian Fossil discoveries instead ;)

Oldest reptile footprints found
Reptile footprints, believed to be the oldest ever discovered, provide evidence of the first creatures to live exclusively on land, scientists say.

Published: 2:46AM BST 30 Jul 2010

The discovery proves the theory that reptiles were the first to make the continental interiors their home. Photo: PA
The 318 million-year-old fossilised reptile footprints were found in sea-cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway, University of London.

The discovery proves the theory that reptiles were the first to make the continental interiors their home.

This is because reptiles do not need to return to water to breed unlike their amphibian cousins.

The rocks in which they occur show that the reptiles lived on dry river plains hundreds of miles from the sea.

These pioneers then paved the way for the diverse ecosystems that exist on land today, the study showed.

The study, undertaken with Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol and Canadian colleagues, was published in journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Professor Benton said: ''The footprints date from the Carboniferous Period when a single supercontinent (Pangaea) dominated the world.

''At first life was restricted to coastal swamps where lush rainforest existed, full of giant ferns and dragonflies.

''However, when reptiles came on the scene they pushed back the frontiers, conquering the dry continental interiors.''

The same team reported the oldest known reptile footprints from a different site in New Brunswick in 2007.

The new discovery is of similar age, and may be even older.

Dr Falcon-Lang added: ''The Bay of Fundy is such an amazing place to hunt for fossils.

''The sea-cliffs are rapidly eroding and each rock-fall reveals exciting new fossils. You just never know what will turn up next.'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dino ... found.html
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Re: Hurricanes/Tropical Storms on the Canadian Prairies???

#6 Postby vbhoutex » Sun Aug 08, 2010 5:55 pm

Wow! I learn something new every day. I had no idea that the Canadian praries had such a motherlode of dinosaur bones. And I certainly didn't know how they came to die either. Very interesting.
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#7 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:30 pm

That we do seem to have Vbhoutex (especially Alberta).

Alberta fossil discovered in 1916 is new species of dinosaur: researchers
EDMONTON— The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011 7:21PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011 7:24PM EST


A team of international scientists says a newly rediscovered dinosaur species once roamed the planes of southern Alberta.

Officials at California's Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology say the skeleton of the Spinops Sternbergorum was discovered southeast of Calgary in 1916 by a father and son science team.
More related to this story

Alberta oil sands yield treasure trove of ancient fossils
Alberta’s dinosaur feathers have paleontologists all atwitter

Infographic
Where feathers came from

Charles and Levi Sternberg sent the two partial skulls to London's Natural History Museum, where they were promptly labelled “rubbish” and forgotten.

Decades later, a team of British and American scientists re-examined the bones and determined they belonged to a species unknown until now.

They say the Spinops Sternbergorum was a cousin to the triceratops and lived 76 million years ago.

The two-ton plant-eater features a distinctive horn projecting from the top of the nose and a boney neck frill with two spikes protruding backward and two hooks curving forward.
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#8 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:52 am

The man behind the amazing Royal Tyrell Museum and who made the vast majority of discoveries in the World Heritage Dinosaur Provincial Park:

DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK - Phil Currie has climbed up and down the sandstone cliffs of Alberta’s badlands so many times over the past 30 years that even on this icy day in December, the lanky 62-year-old paleontologist nimbly leaps from one slippery slope to another without breaking stride.

Seemingly fit students and colleagues quickly fall behind rather than risk breaking a leg in one of the many hidden sinkholes that make this hike hazardous, even when there is no snow.

Currie hasn’t had time to put on fat or lose his agility since he named his first newly discovered dinosaurs in 1979 (Amblydactylus kortmeyeri was a hadrasaurid that had left its footprints in the mud of a now-submerged section of the Peace River canyon).

In 2010, he and his wife Eva Koppelhus, a palynologist who studies pollen spores and other organic matter that can provide insights into the dinosaur’s environment, found themselves on every continent, including Antarctica, where they were part of a team that unearthed a new species of bird-hipped dinosaur dating back 190 million to 200 million years.

Neither Currie nor Koppelhus can remember a year when they weren’t in the field for weeks — sometimes months — at a time, fending off masked fossil poachers in the deserts of Mongolia, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, assessing the relationship between dinosaurs and Komodo dragons in Indonesia or rubbing shoulders with celebrity volunteers such as Dan Aykroyd and Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the fossil-rich Pipestone Creek region of northwestern Alberta where a new dinosaur museum will soon bear Currie’s name.

“I figure we’re on the road about 50 per cent of the time on digs, attending conferences or giving lectures,” says Currie, who is looking tanned and relaxed after a 10-day visit to Thailand that resulted from an invitation from the country’s queen. “It can be wearing at times, but it’s a life that we’re used to. I still enjoy it.”

Currie is here today to meet a Calgary-based helicopter pilot who is going to airlift the 350-kilogram hip bone of a Daspletosaur that had to be left behind last summer because it was too heavy to carry out with the skull, ribs and other fossilized bones that went with it. The dinosaur was discovered by a podiatrist from New York who spotted the foot of the creature protruding from the sand.

Daspletosaur is a direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus. Although not quite as big, it was still at the top of the food chain when it lived in western North America between 74 million and 77 million years ago. Currie is especially pleased about this discovery because it is only the second Daspletosaur ever found in the Oldman Formation of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Few articulated dinosaur fossils are found in this formation close to the river bed.

With a little time to spare before the chopper arrives, Currie leads me to the site of another extraordinary find I saw a few days earlier when I visited his lab at the University of Alberta. The specimen is so rare and so exquisitely preserved that even Currie, modest as he is, acknowledges it will make a huge splash when he reveals its identity in a leading scientific journal in a year or two.

Currie ranks it right up there with the dinosaur eggs that were found in southern Alberta and with the rare, 10-metre-long Gorgosaur unearthed in Dinosaur Provincial Park and now displayed at the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.

When reminded about the herd of tyrannosaurs he dug up at Dry Island in the Alberta badlands in the late 1990s, Currie pauses and smiles; the discovery of as many as 15 Albertasaurus specimens bunched in one spot all but confirmed his then-controversial theory that some tyrannosaurs were not necessarily solitary creatures, as many people had thought.

Many were very social animals that travelled and hunted together, as this herd apparently did before they all died unexpectedly in some natural catastrophe.

“That was memorable,” Currie acknowledges. “But it was Barnum Brown who made the discovery in 1910. All I did was the detective work at the Museum of Natural History in New York that led us back to that forgotten quarry in 1996.”

Currie says he’s a lucky man who tends to be in the right place at the right time. But a theologian might argue there must have been some divine intervention in his becoming one of the world’s leading paleontologists.

How to account for the dinosaur he found in a cereal box when he was six years old? Could a cheap plastic model such as that really inspire a child like him to regularly visit the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? And would those visits explain why he subsequently scrambled up and down the cliffs of Sixteen Mile Creek near his hometown of Brampton, Ont., collecting marine invertebrate fossils? Was it just good luck that brought him to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton in 1976, when the situation was ripening for him to become vice-chairman of planning for the creation of the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller? And who could imagine luck playing a role in his meeting and marrying an attractive Danish palynologist who is as adventurous as he is and thrives in doing the administrative and organizational things that Currie hates to do?

Currie, however, has another explanation for his fascination with dinosaurs.

“I constantly fantasized about discovering dinosaurs, reading and often re-reading every book I could find on the subject,” he says. “But it was the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews who really turned me on. I was 11 years old when I read his book All About Dinosaurs. The power of the written word was what really made me want to be a dinosaur hunter. Extraordinary when you think about it in this day of video games and tweeting.”

Currie doesn’t dispute the idea that he sometimes models himself after Andrews, who is often but wrongly cited as the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character in Steven Spielberg’s famous dinosaur films. In the 1920s, the zoologist trekked through uncharted jungles of Asia and the deserts of Outer Mongolia, risking his life many times in a search for fossils he collected for the American Museum of Natural History.

Like Currie, he claimed to be “born under a lucky star.”

Currie, however, is quick to point out that with a few notable exceptions, such as the time when a gun-toting, horse-riding fossil poacher tried to drive him and his expedition away from a rich fossil bed in Mongolia, he is risk-averse.

“Sometimes, you have no control over what happens,” he says after describing matter-of-factly how difficult it was working in the mountains of Antarctica, where the only way to get to the frigid high-altitude site was by helicopter.

“A few years back, we applied to go into a remote part of China near the Mongolian border. The army said no because it was a demilitarized zone. But when we reapplied to the central government, they gave us the go-ahead. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell the army. So when the army found us there digging, they checked our permits to see what we were up to. Then suddenly, they took us by the arm and marched us to a small village in the middle of the desert where we were lined up against a wall. You can imagine what we were thinking. But then the general stepped in beside us and ordered pictures to be taken of him with us.”

Dinosaurs, of course, aren’t what they used to be in Roy Chapman Andrews’ day or during the half century that followed when new discoveries, better forensic tools and multi-disciplinary thinking gave us a more accurate view of what dinosaurs looked and sounded like, how they behaved and how they interacted.

Gone, for example, is the Velociraptor in Stephen Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park. Studies have shown that although the real Velociraptor was a vicious killer, as portrayed in the movie, it had feathers and was no bigger than a dog.

We also know that the gentle Brontosaurus in The Land Before Time and other films was not the smooth-skinned, 50-tonne swamp creature that was easy prey for any large predator that came along. Now more accurately referred to as Apatosaurus or its close cousin Diplodocus, this dinosaur was even bigger than depicted earlier. It also lived on land rather than in swamps and was often capable of putting up a good fight.

And then there is T. rex, the most famous dinosaur of all. Several recent groundbreaking studies have shown that the king of dinosaurs was a lot faster than previously thought and even more frightening looking than portrayed in those early films.

Currie is one of a small group of contemporary paleontologists who have played key roles in reshaping our thinking of dinosaurs.

He was, for example, right in hypothesizing that some tyrannosaurs were very social. And most people agree he is onto something in suggesting some new species may actually be previously identified dinosaurs that were at different stages of their growth cycle or of the opposite sex.

“The fossil evidence suggests that baby or juvenile dinosaurs were not simply a smaller version of adults,” he says. “As they mature, their anatomy sometimes changes in such a radical way that it might be easy to conclude that they represented a different species.”

Still, Currie has a soft spot for those early images of dinosaurs like the ones that were on display at the Crystal Palace in London in the 1850s.

One of the images he likes best is one that colleague Dale Russell created when he speculated how a bipedal predator such as Troodon would have evolved if a meteorite hadn’t triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Russell’s Dinosauroid still had large eyes and three fingers on each hand, and it might have sounded like a bird. But in many others ways, it resembled an intelligent human in the way that Spielberg’s alien did in the film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

Many paleontologists were repulsed by the anthropomorphism they saw in the model. What the critics failed to appreciate, says Currie, is that it was an important thought experiment. Underlying the effort was the recognition that the brain of Troodon was unusually large for a dinosaur. Had this creature survived and retained the same body size, he points out, it would only be slightly smaller than the brain of a human.

Currie credits Bob Carroll, his PhD supervisor at McGill University, for encouraging him to look at dinosaurs as animals instead of fossils.

It was that kind of thinking that inspired him and a new generation of paleontologists to successfully challenge the long-held view that some dinosaurs were physiologically closer to birds and other modern animals than to reptiles.

Despite the misguided theories of the past, Currie has nothing but admiration for those pioneers of paleontology.

“The fact is that even today we rarely find an entire dinosaur,” he says. “So more often than not in the past, especially in the days when we didn’t have CT scans and other technologies, there was a lot of guessing that went into building dinosaur models.”

Currie has a lot of admirers, but the circumstances surrounding his move from the Tyrrell Museum to the University of Alberta in 1995 say a lot about how he views himself.

In 1994, the U of A’s Michael Caldwell joined Currie and Koppelhus in the field, hoping to convince Currie to consider making the move from the museum to an academic life in which he would mentor students and continue to do field work.

Koppelhus says her husband just didn’t get what Caldwell was up to.

“It couldn’t have been more clear. Michael was doing everything to get Phil to accept. But Phil thought he was thinking of someone else until I took him aside and told him what was going on.”

Currie says he misses the Tyrrell in many ways because he was there from the beginning and accomplished a lot. But he acknowledges that being out of government makes it easier for him to do what he likes, especially now that he has a Canada Research chair that provides funding and resources to continue his cutting-edge research.

“I guess it was luck that made this happen,” he says.

But Currie hasn’t always been lucky.

A trip to the Arctic in the 1980s yielded just one tiny fossil. On that trip, Russell left their tents behind in a helicopter transfer, thinking they could sleep under the midnight sun. None of them had any idea there could be so many mosquitoes on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic.

Then there’s the time 12 years ago when Currie asked the British military if it would transport the 300-kilogram backbone of a duck-billed dinosaur from the Dry Island site in southern Alberta. All seemed to be going well when the helicopter began carrying the fossil out on a sling. But when the load began swaying dangerously, the pilot was forced to jettison it.

“It was surreal,” says Currie. “We could see the dust rising from the ground before we heard the thud. There was nothing left to salvage but dust.”

Now in his 63rd year of life, Currie doesn’t envision himself slowing down soon, although he and Koppelhus are determined to spend more time working in their garden in Edmonton, listening to music and sitting by the fire.

Next year, they plan to be back in the badlands of Alberta, possibly in the deserts of Patagonia, at a field site in Edmonton and in the Pipestone Creek region of Grande Prairie. He’d like to go back to the Arctic, Antarctica and Mongolia.

“I don’t see myself retiring ever,” he says. “I see myself disappearing in a puff of smoke.”

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/travel/Phi ... story.html
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#9 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:00 am

Humans 'evolved from worm creature'
07:24 AEDT Tue Mar 6 2012
http://news.dc1.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8430360/humans-evolved-from-worm-creature


Humans evolved from a five-centimetre-long worm-like creature that wriggled in the sea more than 500 million years ago, scientists have learned.

The extinct Pikaia gracilens has been confirmed as the oldest known member of the chordate family, which includes all modern vertebrates including humans.

It gave rise to the panoply of vertebrate animals alive today - fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals.

When Pikaia was first discovered in 1911 scientists assumed it was related to leeches and earthworms.

But a new study has now confirmed what many experts suspected, that the creature was a primitive ancestor of animals with spinal cords.

At some point in their development from embryo to adult, all chordates have a "notocord", a flexible rod supporting a nerve cord running down the back. The notocord becomes part of the backbone in more evolved vertebrates.

Another characteristic of chordates are myomeres, blocks of muscle tissue often arranged in a zig-zag pattern.

Pikaia had both features, according to the new analysis of 114 specimens published in the journal Biological Reviews.

Lead author Professor Simon Conway Morris, from Cambridge University, said: "The discovery of myomeres is the smoking gun that we have long been seeking.

"Now with myomeres, a nerve cord, a notocord and a vascular (blood vessel) system all identified, this study clearly places Pikaia as the planet's most primitive chordate.

"So, next time we put the family photograph on the mantle-piece, there in the background will be Pikaia."

Pikaia had a sideways-flattened body divided into a series of segmented muscle blocks that lay on either side of its notocord.

It is thought to have swum above the sea floor by bending its body from side-to-side.

Every specimen of Pikaia discovered so far has come from the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Canada's Yoho National Park, which date back 505 million years.

The fossil beds have yielded a number of unusual marine organisms and provided valuable clues about the "Cambrian explosion". This was a period just over 500 million years ago when animals evolved into a vast array of different forms over a relatively short time.

Scientists used a range of imagery techniques, including cutting edge scanning electron microscopes, to reveal fine details in the Pikaia fossils.

Dr Jean-Bernard Caron, from the University of Toronto in Canada, who took part in the research, said: "It's very humbling to know that swans, snakes, bears, zebras and, incredibly, humans all share a deep history with this tiny creature no longer than my thumb.

"Fossils of primitive chordates are incredibly rare. With no backbones or other mineralised elements, Pikaia would stand no chance of preservation in normal conditions outside exceptional sites like the Burgess Shale.

"We hope that, with continuing explorations and field work studies there, other species will be discovered allowing us to refine our understanding of the early history of our own group."
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#10 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Fri Oct 26, 2012 1:13 am

First feathered dinosaur fossils found in North America

(AFP) – 7 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Scientists in Canada have unearthed the first fossils of a feathered dinosaur ever found in the Americas, the journal Science reported on Thursday.

The 75 million year old fossil specimens, uncovered in the badlands of Alberta, Canada, include remains of a juvenile and two adult ostrich-like creatures known as ornithomimids.

Until now feathered dinosaurs have been found mostly in China and in Germany.

"This is a really exciting discovery, as it represents the first feathered dinosaur specimens found in the Western Hemisphere," said Darla Zelenitsky, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary and lead author of the study.

"These specimens are also the first to reveal that ornithomimids were covered in feathers, like several other groups of theropod dinosaurs," Zelenitsky said.

She said the find "suggests that all ornithomimid dinosaurs would have had feathers."

The creatures had a cameo screen appearance in the original Jurassic Park movie in which they were shown being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

In the movie however they were portrayed as having scales rather than plumage -- which researchers say they now know was not the case.

Francois Therrien, curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta and the co-author of the study, said the discovery revealed another fascinating fact -- the existence of early wings in dinosaurs that were too big to fly.

"The fact that wing-like forelimbs developed in more mature individuals suggests they were used only later in life, perhaps associated with reproductive behaviors like display or egg brooding," he said.

Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
Related articles
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#11 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Thu Aug 29, 2013 10:29 pm

The below is courtesy of The Earth Story
(a site I liked on my Facebook feed)

Dinosaur feathers in amber

Image


Yet again a museum drawer has revealed a treasure hidden in plain sight. When a grad student ran through thousands of amber samples at the University of Alberta and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Canada in search of fossilised insects, he uncovered 11 samples containing several kinds of well preserved (down to micron scale) 70-85 million year old Cretaceous dinosaur and early bird feathers. This is our first glimpse of them in the flesh rather than as imprints around fossil saurians or avians preserved in stone. The discovery was published last year in Science.

The small pieces had been collected from mine tailings at Grassy Lake, near Medicine Hat in southern Alberta, Canada's main amber mine. In those days, the area was a swampy and forested coastline on the edge of a large inland sea, in some ways similar in landscape to the modern Everglades in Florida.

The samples displayed several co existing phases in the evolution of feathers, and some had shapes and traces of pigmentation similar to those of modern birds, bringing colour into what had been a black and white world. Traces of pigment chemicals have been found in fossils of dino-birds in China, but this is the first time actual colours have been observed. They suggest mottled hues similar to modern birds, mostly transparent, black or brown.

They range from single filament proto feathers, similar to mammalian fur and the earliest feathers found on dinosaur fossils, to complex types similar to those found in modern diving birds with a capillary action adaptation to hold water for buoyancy when flying underwater or cooling. Others have velcro like barbs between the vanes configured for flight. Some of them are unlike any existing today.

Some of the specimens may have come from early birds, but this era was one when the lines between birds and dinosaurs remain at times fuzzy and imprecise. The wide diversity of feather types now known to already exist in the Mezozoic has fascinated researchers. Some were clearly for flight, others for warmth or display, and the most primitive resemble those on fossil dinosaurs finds from China. Assigning those with modern features to either lineage is currently impossible. Either way, many diverse plumed critters wandered and flew over the late Cretaceous plains of Alberta. No bird or dinosaur fossils were found with the amber, but the site is under deeper investigation.



Loz


Image credit: McKellar, Science.


http://www.livescience.com/16069-amber- ... birds.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/scien ... .html?_r=0

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... ers-amber/

http://phys.org/news/2011-09-tree-resin ... thers.html

http://io9.com/5840854/dinosaur-feather ... dian-amber

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... s-alberta/
http://www.livescience.com/16069-amber- ... birds.html
More pics: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sym ... n-in-time/
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#12 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Wed Oct 02, 2013 9:58 pm

Image


Massive dinosaur fossil unearthed by Alberta pipeline crew
30-metre fossil found by pipeline inspection crew working near Spirit River

CBC News Posted: Oct 02, 2013 7:44 PM MT Last Updated: Oct 02, 2013 7:44 PM MT

A 30-metre-long fossilized dinosaur was found by a pipeline inspection crew working southwest of Spirit River, Alta., on Tuesday. (Courtesy: Darryl Ball and Robert Drake)


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A massive dinosaur fossil has been found by a pipeline inspection crew near Spirit River, Alta.

The 30-metre-long fossilized skeleton was found Tuesday when a backhoe operator working on the Tourmaline Oil Corp. pipeline installation moved some earth, inadvertently breaking off a piece of the fossil.

Thinking he had simply chipped off a section of rock, the backhoe operator laid the piece to the side and turned to resume excavation work.

That’s when he saw the exposed fossil in the embankment in front of him.

As soon as he saw the fossil, the operator stopped digging and work on the site was shut down until experts could be brought in, said Art Wegner, speaking for the Acuren Group Inc.

Palaeontologists from the Tyrell Museum and National Geographic arrived at the site Wednesday and will soon be joined by Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative head palaeontologist, Dr. Matthew Vavrek.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ ... -1.1876996

The fossil was found buried about 1.5 metres deep in the Saddle Hills area southwest of Spirit River.





‘Beautiful’ dinosaur fossil unearthed near Spirit River
By Marty Klinkenberg, Edmonton Journal October 2, 2013 9:00 PM
EDMONTON - Experts are calling a dinosaur fossil unearthed in northern Alberta this week one of the “most complete finds in this part of the world in a long time.”

Brian Brake, executive director of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said the fossilized remains of a hadrosaur were discovered at an energy company’s work site near Spirit River.

Officials from the pipeline firm contacted the museum, which sent paleontologists to assess the find.

“What we have is a totally composed tail,” Brake said. “It’s beautiful.”

The Currie Museum contacted its counterparts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, which sent a team to the work site on Wednesday.

The paleontologists will attempt to carefully remove the fossil from the work site as soon as possible, taking it to either the Tyrrell Museum or to the University of Alberta.

The portion of the tail is about three metres long and the bones along its tail can be easily seen. The hadrosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur with a bill that resembled a duck’s, was probably 10 to 15 metres long, Brake said. They existed during the Upper Cretaceous Period.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technolo ... story.html
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SaskatchewanScreamer

#13 Postby SaskatchewanScreamer » Wed Feb 12, 2014 9:18 pm

New BC fossil site could be world’s most important
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohnslVidjP0

Canada is home to Burgess Shale: an expansive fossil field that contains a diverse array of preserved organisms dating all the way back to the Middle Cambrian, 505 million years ago. There are two well-known sites: one in the Yoho National Park and another 42 km (26 miles) away at Kootenay National Park. Another site has been discovered in Kootenay and could be the richest fossil site ever discovered. The announcement comes from lead author Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto and was published in Nature Communications.

Burgess Shale was discovered in 1909 and is world-renowned for its exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Over the last century of thorough exploration, there have been about 200 different species identified. This new site, dubbed “Marble Canyon,” just might put that figure to shame.

Researchers have only been digging at the site for 15 days but already more than 50 species have been identified - including some entirely new species. Thousands of specimens have been uncovered, a large number of which appear to be arthropods.

The fossils discovered at this site have much to teach us about the Cambrian Explosion, which is when life first really began to diversify. Prior to the Cambrian life on Earth had been relatively simple. Among the arthropod species represented are some that had only been seen before in the Chengjiang fossil beds in China. Because fossils from that site represent the early Cambrian about 10 million years prior, it gives new insight to the global range of certain ancient animals and helps to establish a timeline of how long the species lived. The site also confirms that Pikaia, which was first discovered at the Yoho site in 1911 and looks quite similar to a modern lancet, is the common ancestor of all vertebrates.

Currently, the exact location of the new fossil site within the park has not been released, as the Canadian park officials wish to keep it free from visitors for the moment. The researchers have stated that they are eager for summer to return so that they may continue their field work. Though time and more excavation will ultimately tell the full importance of this new Burgess Shale site, the preliminary numbers indicate that it is well on its way to becoming one of the most important fossil site discoveries in the world.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1141642/new-b ... important/
- See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-an ... 797MQ.dpuf
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