New dinosaur species unveiled at London's Natural History Museum
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Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Arizona fossils reveal an ecosystem in flux early in the age of dinosaurs
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Scientists have unearthed in Arizona fossils from an assemblage of animals, including North America's oldest-known flying reptile, that reveal a time of transition when venerable lineages that were destined soon to vanish lived alongside newcomers early in the age of dinosaurs. The remains of the pterosaur, roughly the size of a small seagull, and the other creatures were discovered in Petrified Forest National Park, a place famous for producing fossils of plants and animals from the Triassic Period including huge tree trunks. The newly found fossils are 209 million years old and include at least 16 vertebrate species, seven of them previously unknown. The Triassic came on the heels of Earth's biggest mass extinction 252 million years ago, and then ended with another mass extinction 201 million years ago that wiped out many of the major competitors to the dinosaurs, which achieved unquestioned supremacy in the subsequent Jurassic period. Both calamities apparently were caused by extreme volcanism. The fossils, entombed in rock rich with volcanic ash, provide a snapshot of a thriving tropical ecosystem crisscrossed by rivers on the southern edge of a large desert. Along with the pterosaur were other new arrivals on the scene including primitive frogs, lizard-like reptiles and one of the earliest-known turtles - all of them resembling their relatives alive today. This ecosystem's largest meat-eaters and plant-eaters were part of reptile lineages that were flourishing at the time but died out relatively soon after. While the Triassic ushered in the age of dinosaurs, no dinosaurs were found in this ecosystem, illustrating how they had not yet become dominant. "Although dinosaurs are found in contemporaneous rocks from Arizona and New Mexico, they were not part of this ecosystem that we are studying," said paleontologist Ben Kligman of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, who led the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This is peculiar, and may have to do with dinosaurs preferring to live in other types of environments," Kligman added. This ecosystem was situated just above the equator in the middle of the bygone supercontinent called Pangaea, which later broke apart and gave rise to today's continents. Pterosaurs, cousins of the dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, followed much later by birds and bats. Pterosaurs are thought to have appeared roughly 230 million years ago, around the same time as the earliest dinosaurs, though their oldest-known fossils date to around 215 million years ago in Europe. The newly identified pterosaur, named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, is thought to have hunted fish populating the local rivers. Its partial skeleton includes part of a tooth-studded lower jaw, some additional isolated teeth and the bones of its elongated fingers, which helped form its wing apparatus. Its wingspan was about three feet (one meter) and its skull was about four inches (10 cm) long. It had curved fangs at the front of its mouth for grabbing fish as it flew over rivers and blade-like teeth in the back of the jaw for slicing prey. The researchers said Eotephradactylus would have had a tail, as all the early pterosaurs did. Eotephradactylus means "ash-winged dawn goddess," recognizing the nature of the rock in which it was found and the position of the species near the beginning of the pterosaur lineage. Mcintireae recognizes Suzanne McIntire, the former Smithsonian fossil preparator who unearthed it. The turtle was a land-living species while the lizard-like reptile was related to New Zealand's modern-day Tuatara. Also found were fossils of some other reptiles including armored plant-eaters, a large fish-eating amphibian and various fish including freshwater sharks. The ecosystem's biggest predators were croc relatives perhaps 20 feet (six meters) long, bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs inhabiting that part of the world at the time. On land was a four-legged meat-eating reptile from a group called rauisuchians. In the rivers dwelled a semi-aquatic carnivore from a group called phytosaurs, built much like a crocodile but with certain differences, such as nostrils at the top of the head rather than the end of the snout. Rauisuchians, phytosaurs and some other lineages represented in the fossils disappeared in the end-Triassic extinction event. Frogs and turtles are still around today, while pterosaurs dominated the skies until the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ended the age of dinosaurs. "The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities," Kligman said.
Fast Company
3 hours ago
- Fast Company
Scientists are holding a ‘science fair' in the lobby of a Congressional building to show what the US stands to lose with cuts
All's fair on Capitol Hill. In response to the Trump administration's wide-ranging science cuts and grant cancellations, researchers and scientists staged a 'science fair' in the lobby of a Congressional building in Washington D.C. to bring awareness to what potential knowledge the United States could miss out on as a result. The fair is being held just days after Trump signed the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' into law, which codifies many spending cuts and funding cancellations for scientific endeavors of all types—from climate research to medical trials. Billions of dollars that were destined for researchers and scientists in the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other organizations. In effect, the U.S. is ceding its place as a leader in research and development—a role it has held for decades, and which has led to the development of cures for diseases and disorders, advanced military technology, and, of course, put a man on the moon. The funding cuts and cancellations are widespread, and it's difficult to lasso them all. But even with what's been cancelled or clawed back so far, Trump is looking to reduce spending on science further. In the budget request he released in May, billions more would be cut from NIH, NSF, the Department of Education, and completely eliminate funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and more. In response, Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), released a statement saying just how dangerous the cuts could be. 'If enacted, the FY26 budget request would end America's global scientific leadership. The cuts to science would imperil our nation's future health, security and prosperity. This budget proposal stands in stark contrast to the President's call for a renewed commitment to American scientific leadership,' he wrote. 'Congress has demonstrated a bipartisan commitment to investment in research and must do so again to answer the President's call. That's all to say that despite the demonstrations by scientists, and the potential long-term economic effects of cuts, the Trump administration may still not be done. Just within the past couple of days, Trump cut off researchers in the U.K. from utilizing data collected by U.S. satellites to study pollution and climate change, according to reporting from the U.K.-based The i Paper. Per that report, Rachel Cauley, OMB communications director at the White House, responded to worried scientists by saying that 'President Trump ran on defunding woke, weaponized, and wasteful government and his budget proudly does that by cutting funding for the Green New Scam, projects like 'gender-responsive agricultural adaptation' in Guatemala and Mexico, and 'Equity Climate and Health' workshops for 'transgender women, and those who identify as non-binary.' Under Trump's leadership, the US is funding real science again.'
Gizmodo
4 hours ago
- Gizmodo
New Research Bolsters Freaky Theory That Earth Sits in a Giant Cosmic Void
Images of the cosmos, such as the James Webb Space Telescope's deep space snapshot, make space look chock-full of stuff. In the grand scheme of things, it is, but all those stars, galaxies, planets, and other celestial objects may not be as uniformly distributed as photos make them look. The fact is, space is likely peppered with bubbles of relative emptiness, and some astronomers believe we're sitting inside of one. A growing body of evidence suggests that our entire Milky Way galaxy is located within an enormous cosmic void. Most recently, researchers found that sound waves from the early universe—essentially the sound of the Big Bang—support this idea. This work, led by Indranil Banik, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth, proposes a solution for the Hubble tension: one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. Banik and his colleagues published their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in May. He has been working on the Hubble tension for the past five years. This puzzling cosmological problem stems from two differing values calculated for the Hubble constant, which represents the expansion rate of today's universe. 'The Hubble tension is a mismatch between the rate at which we expect the universe to be expanding—based on extrapolating observations of the infant universe forward to today, using the standard cosmological model—and the rate at which we actually observe it to be expanding when we look at the nearby universe,' Banik told Gizmodo. It's really a mismatch between theory and observations.' Basically, galaxies and stars in the local, more recent universe appear to be moving away faster than the Hubble constant predicts. This defies the standard cosmological model, which describes how the universe grows and evolves. It also throws the age of the universe into question, as astronomers need the Hubble constant to extrapolate how much time has passed since the Big Bang. Banik believes the local void theory can offer a solution. If our galaxy is located inside a bubble of relatively empty space, gravity would pull nearby matter toward the higher density exterior of the void, he explained in a Royal Astronomical Society statement. As the void empties out, the velocity of objects moving away from us would be larger than if the void were not there, thus giving the appearance of a faster local expansion rate, Banik said. For this to make sense, our solar system would need to be near the center of a void about two billion light-years wide with a density about 20% lower than the average density of the universe (to be clear, a void isn't just empty space—it's a region of the universe with fewer galaxies and less matter than average). This theoretical low-density region has become known as the KBC void. Multiple studies have supported its existence, including several authored by Banik. Still, the local void theory remains controversial because the void doesn't fit with the standard model of cosmology, which states that the matter that makes up today's universe should be more uniformly spread out on such large scales. The KBC void 'is too large and too deep for the standard model of cosmology, where the chance of us randomly finding ourselves in such a void is about one in a billion,' Banik told Gizmodo. 'So we would need to adjust the model such that structure on scales beyond about one hundred million light-years grows faster than the model predicts.' His most recent study looked at baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). These are a pattern of wrinkles in the density distribution of galaxy clusters spread across the universe. Banik likened them to sound waves from the Big Bang. BAOs provide an independent way to measure the expansion rate of the universe and how fast that rate has changed throughout cosmic history. These 'sound waves' act as a sort of standard ruler, and astronomers can use the ruler's angular size to chart the history of cosmic expansion, according to Banik. He and his colleagues considered all available BAO measurements over the last 20 years. Their work showed that a local void model is about one hundred million times more likely than a standard cosmological model without a local void. This is strong evidence to suggest that we are, indeed, living inside a cosmic void, but it isn't definitive proof. Banik is also working with supernovae data to investigate one of the main pitfalls of the local void theory. 'Any kind of local or late-time solution to the Hubble tension implies that in the more distant universe, there wasn't a Hubble tension,' he explained. 'Supernovae data seem to suggest that the Hubble tension actually does persist out to higher redshift.' If he can find evidence to show that the Hubble tension disappears beyond the local universe, that would be a breakthrough for the local void theory. For now, though, this cosmic conundrum will remain unresolved.
