What’s New On The Dinosaur Front?

Dinosaurs, every kid is fascinated by them and secretly many adults. I think this is one of the reasons dinosaur movies have been so successful. A new fact has come out about dinosaurs, at least it is a new fact to me. Scientists have found the big dinosaurs avoided the tropics. So much for the authenticity of those movies which show giant dinosaurs in tropical jungles near the Equator. Unfortunately for me I will remember this every time I see a dinosaur movie. A new dinosaur species has been discovered and the scientists have nicknamed it Hellboy. It resembles Triceratops and is believed to be a close relative, but there are some differences. Where a Triceratops had a rounded hood on its head with two horns above the eyes, this creature had a hood which had protuberances that remind one of the tops of picket fences and they go all around the hood. It still has the two horns above the eyes and a horn like a Rhino. The animal has been dated as living about 70 million years ago. One major difference between Triceratops and Hellboy is Hellboy has much smaller horns above its eyes. It is believed both species used their horns for mating displays and scientists feel they would not have been much use in fending off the large dinosaurs like T-Rex.

A very unexpected discovery was made and it was one which was thought to be impossible. It turns out about 100 years ago some fossils which were discovered were sent to a museum’s crap pile of fossils. That is where fossils went which were thought to be in such bad condition they were useless. Scientists were looking through these fossils and couldn’t believe what they found. It was traces of soft tissue and red blood cells. Most of the fossils in a museum are not allowed to be to be sectioned or broken, but these fossils were not ones the museum seemed to care about. One was a claw from a therapod, another the limb from a duck-billed dinosaur and another the toe of a triceratops. The claw still had red blood cells inside it. We are talking about a fossil which has been estimated to be over 75 million years old. The first thing which comes to my mind is Jurassic Park. Here is the odd part, at first it was thought to be human blood from a person who cut themselves, but this was disproved. There was another find which also was incredible and it was bands of fibers which contained amino acids associated with collagen. This is what creates our skin and tissues. The scientists claim they haven’t found any genetic material yet, but state it would not be wise to say they never will.

There is some new dinosaur research which has become controversial. The reason for this controversy is the fact dinosaurs have been considered for so long to have been cold blooded. Scientists believe dinosaurs first appeared about 231.4 million years ago. Once they came upon the scene they dominated everywhere they went. After all what could stand up to one of these giants? Most of us think the only difference between a lizard today and a dinosaur is basically their size, but according to new test results we could be wrong. Some scientists say they did a re-analysis of the dinosaur physiology and they have determined dinosaurs were a lot more complicated than we suspect and were warm blooded mammals. This is not the first time this conclusion was reached. Scientists at CalTech reached the same conclusion in 2011. The problem is not all scientists agree with this conclusion.

Scientists were very happy to find the brains of two ancient sea creatures they refer to as sea-monsters. They have begun to examine them hoping to understand how modern animals such as scorpions and lobsters evolved. There is a structure which is oval shaped and appears in the heads of ancient arthropods and this structure has puzzled scientists. One of the reasons is prehistoric arthropods have this structure while it doesn’t appear in others. While scientists were examining these structures in 500 million year old arthropod brains they claimed to have figured out what the structure did. They say it was associated with the animal’s bulbous eyes. When the examinations were finished the specimens were sent to the Smithsonian, in Washington D.C.

The Chinese had said they found a dinosaur fossil with feathers on it. Another interesting find took place in Canada. Paleontologists announced they had found dinosaur feathers preserved in amber a couple of years ago. It is beginning to look like many if not all dinosaurs had feathers like birds and bird feathers could have evolved from the feathers on dinosaurs. One scientist referred to the fact they had a gallery of intriguing feathers encased in amber. He went on to say the samples show feathers in different stages of evolution. The researchers referred to the similarity of colors of the dinosaur feathers to that of modern birds. They also referred to the similarity in shape. There are other structures which don’t resemble what we see today. Here is an address for photos of Dinosaur feathers, http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/dinosaurs-feathers-amber-photos-110915.htm, you can copy and paste it into your browser’s address bar. Sorry About Facts doesn’t use live links.

Not all dinosaurs were huge monsters. A tiny dinosaur fossil was discovered in South Korea. The fossil is complete and is only about 11 inches long. Scientists believe when it was alive it was about 20 inches long, still not what I would call formidable. The scientists think the creature was a microraptor or some other type of raptor. Some scientists think there may be a chance this could be an undiscovered type of dinosaur. I am sure its discoverer would like that. The dinosaur is from the Cretaceous period and is believed to have lived about 66 million years ago. It looked more like a bird according to some. Microraptors had four wings. Because of when it lived it was subject to the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event. Here is something I find really strange, this creature was a theropod which means it belonged to a family of dinosaurs which included the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex. When the scientists found this fossil they were very excited, because the vertebrae was still connected to the ribs, something which was very unusual. Another point is small dinosaur fossils are much rarer than big ones for some reason.

Many scientists believe a large meteor impact was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, but not all. There are those who think it was a disease and they base this upon their examination of dinosaur poop. Of those who do believe in the impact theory, a smaller portion believe some dinosaurs survived, but the gene pool became too restricted due to the lack of enough diversity and this was what wiped out the remaining dinosaurs.