'Stocky dragon' dinosaur terrorized Late Cretaceous Europe

'Stocky dragon' dinosaur terrorized Late Cretaceous Europe

Balaur bondoc used extendable claws to attack and tear apart prey

		IMAGE: This reconstruction shows the skeletal anatomy of Balaur bondoc. While only a few bones exist, they reveal a great deal about the organism, and represent one of the most complete... Click here for more information.

Paleontologists have discovered that a close relative of Velociraptor hunted the dwarfed inhabitants of Late Cretaceous Europe, an island landscape largely isolated from nearby continents.

While island animals tend to be smaller and more primitive than their continental cousins, the theropod Balaur bondoc was as large as its relatives on other parts of the globe and demonstrated advanced adaptations including fused bones and two terrifyingly large claws on each hind foot.

A team of Paleontologists from the University of Bucharest and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) present their findings as the cover story of the Aug. 31st issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"While we would expect that there were carnivorous animals in these faunas, finding one as unusual as Balaur is thrilling and is testament to the unusual animals found on islands today and in the past," said paleontologist and co-author Mark Norell of AMNH.

The Balaur bondoc bones (Balaur from an archaic Romanian term for dragon, bondoc meaning stocky) represent the most complete predator skeleton paleontologists have found in sediments from the end of the Mesozoic in Europe.

While few in number, the fossils reveal an animal perhaps six to seven feet long with a stockier build than similarly sized Velociraptors elsewhere on the globe, but numerous similarities to the more familiar predator.

		IMAGE: The fossilized hindlimb of Balaur bondoc shows the double-sickle claws of the foot, one of 20 unique features found on the animal, which lived on a Late Cretaceous island in... Click here for more information.

"Although Balaur is so extremely divergent morphologically, it is closely related to animals like Velociraptor and the feathered dinosaurs in China," said lead author Zoltan Csiki, a paleontologist at the University of Bucharest. "The finding indicates that this area of the world, despite its archipelago geography, had at least intermittent faunal connections with the mainland up to the end of the Cretaceous. This connection was not really acknowledged until very recently."

The Balaur research was funded in part by the American Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation through grant EAR-0207664 , the Columbia University Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Romanian National University Research Council, and Richard and Lynn Jaffe.

For more information about the discovery, read the embargoed AMNH press release at: http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2010-08/amon-spd082510.php

Fossil of the Week

8/26 – Darwin’s Barnacles

Barnacles – the Cirripedia – are a type of arthropod in the subphylum Crustacea, but until just before Charles Darwin’s travels on the HMS Beagle, they were classified as mollusks (along with clams and snails because of their hard shells). Although there are many different types of barnacles*, what we would most commonly recognize as one – little hard volcano-shapes such as those shown here – is only the calcium carbonate shell with which the organism surrounds its soft body. Inside, the barnacle animal lies on its back and extends specialized legs out of the opening at the top to catch food particles when the tide covers it. This opening can be closed when the water level around the barnacle drops, allowing it to survive until the tide comes up again.

Charles Darwin became interested in barnacles while working his way through material that he’d collected during his travels. He found an unusual specimen that he couldn’t classify. In an attempt to understand it, he examined other barnacles, which led to his eight-year project studying and publishing on the living and fossil barnacles of Great Britain. This work helped him to refine many of his ideas about species and evolution, such as homology (similarity due to common ancestry). It is in large part this work and his geological publications from his travels that established him as a competent and thorough researcher and gained him a receptive audience to the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Although the Acorn Barnacles shown here aren’t from Great Britain, they are quite similar to those that Darwin would have worked on. This fossil is Balanus concavus (PRI Acc. No. 1459) from the Choptank Formation, a silt and sandstone unit that forms part of the Miocene Chesapeake Group. It outcrops extensively in Maryland – this particular locality at Governor Run is on the western coast of Chesapeake Bay, not far from the famous Calvert Cliffs.

Text by Ursula Smith (reprinted from “Fossil Focus” in American Paleontologist, Spring 2009)

*For more on barnacles, see Fossils of the Week 7/21/10 - Coronula macsotayi, 3/17/10 – Goose Barnacle, and 2/17/10 – Big-Mouthed Barnacle.

An Evening with John Gurche

The New Human Origins Hall and a Sneak Peek at a New Discovery
Friday, August 27
Reception 6 p.m. Lecture 6:30 p.m.
Join Artist-in-Residence John Gurche as he discusses the newly discovered hominin Australopithecus sediba from South Africa. He is currently working on this discovery for National Geographic. John will also talk about the sculptures he worked on at the Museum of the Earth which are now on display at the Smithosonian Museum in Washington, DC. Snacks and wine will be provided.

Admission:
NonMembers: Adults $10, Student/Senior $7, Youth $5
Members: Adults $5, Student/Senior $3, Youth $2

Fossils + Fried Dough = FUN

Dig This!
Visitors to the New York State Fair can dig for fossils
with the Museum of the Earth

The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) and its Museum of the Earth will be bringing its popular Fossil Dig Pile to the New York State Fair in Syracuse, NY from August 26 to September 6, 2010. Visitors will have the chance to dig through 380-million-year-old shale from the Ithaca area hunting for fossils.

The Central New York area is filled with fossils from the Devonian period (about 350-400 million-years-ago), and it’s quite common to find them at parks or in your own backyard. These fossils can tell us a great deal about what life was like millions of years ago and about the geology of our landscape.

“Geology is a local subject,” stated Rob Ross, Associate Director of Outreach at the Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth. “No two places share exactly the same sequence of geological events that led to the way they are today. In this sense, geology is a subject to be explored in one’s own neighborhood, examining the detailed sequence of rocks for the history that has gone on under our feet, and finding clues to what life was like as the earth evolved over the last 4-billion years.”

To dig for fossils and find your very own Trilobite, or Crinoid, or Ammonoid be sure to visit the Museum of the Earth at the Youth Building at the New York State Fair. If you can’t make it to the fair, you can dig for fossils at the Museum located in Ithaca, NY every day!

We hope you can join us! It's always a fun time!

Scinetiest find oldest record of animal life on Earth...

Scientists find oldest record of animal life on Earth

The fossils were found in an Australian glacial deposit.

Fossils from Australia show animal life on Earth began at least 650 million years ago, 70 million years earlier than previous estimates, Princeton University scientists report.

Read more at CNN.Com:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/18/scientists-find-oldest-record-of-life-on-earth/

James Potorti Interpretive Gorge Walks

Gorge Walk Trivia

Q. Why is this limestone in the below video, taken at Taughannock Falls State Park, rippled? Take a look nd see if you can figure it out! (The answer will be at the bottom of the post.)



Have you joined us on one of our Gorge Walks? If not you should! They are a lot of fun and you can explore our local geology with Museum educators. You can journey into the rock at a different state park each Friday in August from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. No registration is required! Free for everyone (you must pay for any parking fees)!

Tomorrows walk:

August 20th: Watkins Glen State Park
Meet at the end of the lower (main) parking lot, near the beginning of the trail.

Next weeks walk:

August 27th: Buttermilk Falls State Park
Meet near the bottom of Buttermilk Falls and the start of the Gorge Trail

About the James Potorti Interpretive Gorge Walks:

PRI has been offering summer gorge walks for 12 years. They were officially renamed in 2005 to the James Potorti Interpretive Gorge Walks in memory of Ithaca native James E. Potorti, who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The renaming of the walks was a result of an endowment gift to the Museum from his widow, Nikki Stern, Executive Director of Families of September 11. Potorti, 52, was a vice president at Marsh & McLennan, a financial services company, and worked on the 94th floor of 1 World Trade Center. His first career, however, was as a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He grew up in Ithaca and attended SUNY Oswego.

A.) The pits in the limestone are caused by acid in the rain.

Fossil of the Week

Picture an ammonite and you’re probably thinking about something that looks rather like a discus – flat and coiled only in one plane in the typical planispiral shape that’s familiar in most of the ammonoids and nautiloids. Heteromorph ammonites, however, are not “normal” ammonites. In fact, they grow into all sorts of strange shapes and look really weird. The one pictured here [Didymoceras sp., from the Campanian Stage (Upper Cretaceous Series, ca. 80 million years ago) of Bélo sur Tsiribina, Madagascar, PRI K22064, Klose Collection] is relatively tame. It’s still basically a spiral, just a very loose one. Many of the heteromorphs remained quite coiled, just not in one dimension, sometimes ending up looking rather like gastropod shells, while some started growing as standard planispiral shells then de-coiled. Some groups, though, abandoned normal ammonite coiling altogether and came almost totally unraveled. Some became hooked J shapes, some U shapes, or even trombone-like. Still others straightened out completely and looked superficially like belemnites or orthoconic nautiloids. Some of the heteromorphs seem to have just tied themselves in knots!

We tend to think of ammonites as having been speedy predators, propelling themselves through the ocean by jet propulsion. But the heteromorphs don’t look particularly streamlined, and in fact, biomechanical and hydrodynamic studies of models in flume tanks support the idea that these odd ammonites probably weren’t going anywhere fast. Some probably floated around in the open ocean, eating whatever happened to pass by (rather than actively hunting), and some might actually have been benthic, living slow or sedentary lives on the sea floor.

It is not clear what adaptational advantages favored the evolution of heteromorph ammonites, but they are common and occurred in a number of lineages throughout the history of the group. Some of them (such as the straight Baculites that could reach up to 6½ feet, or 2 meters, long) were extremely diverse, so they must have been doing something right. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they were cited as being a wonderful example of a phenomenon dubbed “racial senescence” in which a lineage was thought to go through a period of degeneration as it declines and eventually becomes extinct. The whole idea of racial senescence has since been abandoned, but it is clear that heteromorph ammonites don’t fit that pattern anyway: they were a successful, if strange, part of the ammonite story.

Text by Ursula Smith (reprinted from “Fossil Focus” in American Paleontologist, Summer 2010)

Dogs Love Trilobites!

Yes, even dogs love the Museum of the Earth's stuffed trilobites! Here's a 4 year old French Bulldog, Curry, enjoying some playtime with his stuffed trilobite!

Curry is the beloved companion of David Thompson from Ann Arbor, Michigan. David is a member of the Friends of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and some of his fossils can be seen on the website for them at http://strata.geology.wisc.edu/mibasin this site is maintain by U. of M. and University of Wisconsin.

If you are interested in getting your own stuffed trilobite be sure to stop by the Museum Shop and pick one up!

An Eveing with John Gurche...

The New Human Origins Hall and a Sneak Peek at a New Discovery
Friday, August 27
Reception 6 p.m. Lecture 6:30 p.m.
Join Artist-in-Residence John Gurche as he discusses the newly discovered hominin Australopithecus sediba from South Africa. He is currently working on this discovery for National Geographic. John will also talk about the sculptures he worked on at the Museum of the Earth which are now on display at the Smithosonian Museum in Washington, DC. Snacks and wine will be provided.

Admission:
NonMembers: Adults $10, Student/Senior $7, Youth $5
Members: Adults $5, Student/Senior $3, Youth $2

Fossil of the Week

8/11/10 - Concretion

Although this might look like a fossilized turtle shell, it is neither a turtle nor a shell. It's a concretion, and a big one, approximately 30 centimeters (12 inches) in diameter. Concretions are not fossils at all. They are common geologic phenomena found in all types of sedimentary rock, especially the shales and siltstones of central New York, so they are quite common in the Ithaca area. Concretions form when minerals (such as calcium carbonate, which forms limestone) within soft sediment precipitate in concentric layers around a nucleus, such as a shell or pebble. So a concretion often actually contains a fossil. Concretions are spherical to oval masses, and are harder than the surrounding rock, so the rock weathers first, exposing the concretion. They can range in size from less than an inch to several feet in diameter. Sometimes the concretion will crack and the cracks will fill with matrix, forming a rounded rock that looks like a turtle shell, like this one here.

Descriptions of concretions date from geological publications of the 18th century. They have been misinterpreted as dinosaur eggs, animal and plant fossils, extraterrestrial debris, and human artifacts. Bowling Balls Beach in Mendocino County, California, is well known for its ball-shaped concretions that weather out of the Cenozoic mudstone. Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota has concretions that are almost 10 feet in diameter. Small hematite concretions, called "blueberries," have even been observed on the planet Mars. Other names that have been applied to concretions are Kansas Pop Rocks, Moki Marbles, Koutu Boulders, septaria, cannonballs, and doggers.

Text by Paula Mikkelsen

ARTfest at the MOTE!

Join us Sunday, August 8th from 10am to 5 pm for ARTfest at the MOTE! It's Ithaca's newest fine art festival! Be inspired and spend the day browsing and buying original artwork throughout the grounds, watching and listening to live entertainment and visiting the Museum. For a complete list of artisans check out the website: http://artfestmote.com/

Fossil of the Week

8/4/10 – Worm Snails

This tangled mass of calcareous tubes is a colony of worm snails in the gastropod (snail) family Vermetidae. There are at least three individuals in this cemented mass – one at the top (you can see the opening, or aperture, of the shell at top left), one at the bottom (aperture at bottom right), and one at the lower left (beside the “1.0 cm” marker). A fourth one might be the bulge at lower right. Worm snails begin their lives as “normal” snails, crawling around on a muscular foot. But very soon after the larva settles, it cements itself to a hard surface, like a rock or shell. After this, its regular shell coiling becomes irregular as it builds new coils around itself, often in a colonial mass such as this one. The worm snail is thus forever immobile. So, how does it eat? It can’t hunt down prey, or even graze on algae, in its upright position. Well, worm snails have evolved an ability possessed by many immobile animals – it filter feeds! Like all mollusks, the worm snail produces mucus with a gland in its foot. But it does something very clever and unusual with this mucus – it sends the mucus out in big webs in the seawater, where the sticky surface gets covered with organic particles and small bits of plankton that float by. The worm snail then reels in the mucus web and eats it – organic bits and all! Good recycling too!

This particular worm snail is Petaloconchus transcostatus Dockery, 1977, from Town Creek, Hinds County, Mississippi, in layers of the Upper Eocene Epoch, Jackson Group, Moody Branch Formation. It is the holotype* specimen, catalog number PRI 8232.

David T. Dockery III, the author of this species, was the recipient of PRI’s Gilbert Harris Award in 1993, the very first time that the award was given. The Harris award is given annually in recognition of excellence in contributions to systematic paleontology; it is named after PRI's founder who dedicated his career to the pursuit of systematic paleontology. Dockery is best known for his many publications on the fossils of Mississippi, including “Mollusca of the Moody Branch Formation,” where this worm snail first appeared. He has been a member of PRI since the 1970s, having been nominated by Katherine Palmer (PRI’s second director) herself in 1972. He has spent his career as a geologist for the state of Mississippi, and now lives and works in Clinton, Mississippi.

*See Fossil of the Week 8/19/09 - Cerithium gainesensis for a definition of "holotype."

Text by Dr. Paula Mikkelsen

Notes from the Field...Thailand

Dr. Paula Mikkelsen is back from attending the World Congress of Malacology in Phuket, Thailand, and sends the following wrap-up:

The Grand Assembly of the World Congress of Malacology indicated that the meeting had 326 attendees (30% of which were students), 236 papers (31% by students), 115 posters (40% by students) – what a great turnout, especially with regard to attracting participation by students, who are indeed the future of our science. The BivAToL Project held its full-day symposium on Bivalve Evolution on Thursday of the meeting. The 20 presentations to a packed audience spanned all of the morphological, molecular, and phylogenetic working groups within the Project, plus fascinating talks on bivalve larvae, shell shape morphometrics, symbiotic cyanobacteria, fossil bivalves, gene evolution, and biogeography by colleagues from England, Russia, China, Germany, Spain, and the U.S. A celebratory dinner at a hillside restaurant the evening after the symposium was the icing on the cake for hardworking Project participants! This meeting was superbly organized, in an enchanting land, and will be a hard act to follow. The next WCM in 2013 will be in Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel, University of the Açores, organized by incoming President Antonio Frias Martins.