Welcome to my blog.
All in Animal History
A fossil discovered in Texas four decades ago has sat unexamined in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, until now. The 270-million (ish) year-old amphibian fossil has finally been described and named, Kermitops gratus, after beloved Muppet, Kermit the Frog.
A new (but very old) Jurassic-era creature has just been described by paleontologists, and it already goes by many names: ancient sea monster, Lorrainosaurus, sea murderer (!), and, as noted in the journal Scientific Reports, where the new research appears, “macropredatory pliosaurid.”
Venture capital firms (including one funded by the CIA) are pouring millions into cloning technology in order to bring back a few long-lost creatures, such as the wooly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. But if and when these animals are revived, they will be fey imitations, look-alikes that lack essential features of the real article.
Another year, another headline along the lines of “The T. Rex may have been a lot smarter than you thought.” That one appears in the Washington Post this week, for an article written by the aptly named Dino Grandoni.
Many species of dinosaurs have been discovered at Hermiin Tsav in the Gobi Desert over the years, but now there is something new to describe: the first swimming dinosaur. The creature was not a giant but a foot-long streamlined beast, with long jaws full of tiny teeth. The theropod, or hollow-bodied dinosaur, had three toes and claws on each limb and swam in prehistoric Mongolia 145 to 66 million years ago when there were lakes and rivers. Seoul National University paleontologist Sungjin Lee and colleagues have named the dinosaur Natovenator polydontus, the “many-toothed swimming hunter.”
Evolutionary biologists have something called the “island rule,” which posits that organisms that evolve on islands will, over time, become smaller than their mainland counterparts. A new dwarf dinosaur species discovered in western Romania – which long, long ago featured tropical islands – supports the theory.
Christie’s was about to auction off a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in Hong Kong this month, looking to fetch between $15 million and $25 million, but canceled the sale when doubts were raised about how much of the fossilized bones were really old and how the critter was described in marketing materials.
Dallas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences says it is “combining the science of genetics [as they] endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat.” In other words, they want to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth.
The IUCN’s announcement last month that the Chinese paddlefish is officially extinct was really a formality. This species of sturgeon, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, checked out sometime between 2005 and 2010. It was already considered “functionally extinct” in 1993 when a tiny remaining population could no longer sustain itself.
The fossilized gorgosaurus skeleton has fetched a whopping $6.1 million in auction at Sotheby’s. The sale is the latest in a disturbing trend, as more and more dinosaur fossils become monetized and lost to research.
This week Sotheby’s will auction off a fossilized skeleton of a gorgosaurus, an apex predator that terrorized North America 77 million years ago. The “exhibition-ready mounted skeleton” is over nine feet high and almost 22 feet long. It has 79 actual fossil elements, with some additional cast pieces to complete the specimen. The fossils were excavated in 2018 in Choteau County, Montana.
Nothing good has come of Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine. Besides the toll on human life, the war has destroyed or damaged zoos and animal shelters, damaged terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and upended the lives of all species caught in the crossfire. It has also severely disrupted scientific research – in Russia.
There’s a new dinosaur species on the block. Discovered in Argentina’s Patagonian Desert, the new guy looks a lot like a Tyrannosaurus rex but is only a distant cousin to the classic predator.
