Strange/Rare Fauna Reports
Strange/Rare Fauna Reports
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Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Wednesday, 19 April 2006
Remains of an enormous species of carnivorous dinosaur, longer than all other previously identified meat-eating dinos, have been found in Argentina, scientists say.
Researchers announced that the newly discovered meat muncher Mapusaurus roseae belongs to a group of gigantic carnivorous dinosaurs called carcharodontosaurids.
This group includes Giganotosaurus, the largest meat-eating dinosaur to ever walk the Earth.
The discovery of the new dinosaur in western Patagoniais is published in the latest issue of the journal Geodiversitas.
Palaeontologists say Mapusaurus was more than 12 metres long and had a shinbone that was longer than that of Giganotosaurus.
But the current record-holder retains its "largest" title because Giganotosaurus would have been wider and heavier than Mapusaurus.
Nevertheless, the new dinosaur would have been an intimidating creature, especially when it was part of a group.
Hundreds of bones
Researchers found hundreds of Mapusaurus bones dating to 100 million years together in a pack that would have included 5 metre long juveniles and adults which were more than 12 metres long.
"This is arguably the nastiest thing ever found, as it is the first pack found for giant meat-eating dinosaurs," says 'Dino' Don Lessem, who participated in the dig and helped to fund it.
Lessem, a dinosaur expert who was a consultant on the film Jurassic Park, says that Mapusaurus would have lived at the same time as the largest animal that ever lived, Argentinosaurus, which was a 38 metre long plant-eating dinosaur.
"In a pack, [Mapusaurus] could take down this herbivore despite its weight - 10 times [more than] even this largest of meat eaters," he says.
Like T-rex
Philip Currie, who also worked on the excavation and is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, says the new dinosaur somewhat resembled Tyrannosaurus rex.
"Mapusaurus looked something like T. rex but had a longer, narrower skull," Currie explains.
"Its teeth were shorter and more blade-like. The teeth and long skull were better adapted to biting big chunks of meat out of sauropod dinosaurs. T. rex, on the other hand, had longer, thicker teeth for biting through the bones of its prey."
The palaeontologists therefore think the newly discovered carnivore both scavenged and hunted for meat.
Hunting in packs
Dr Rodolfo Coria, who also worked on the excavation and is a palaeontologist at the Carmen Funes Museum in Argentina, says that Mapusaurus may have been unique among carnivores in that it seemed to live a more social life as it was found in a pack.
T. rex and virtually all other carnivorous dinosaurs usually are solitary specimens, suggesting they mostly lived and hunted alone.
Coria says it is possible the big meat eaters evolved different habits for each species, and Mapusaurus simply may have been more social. The pack even appears to have passed away together in a mass die-off.
Dr Michael Ryan, curator and head of vertebrate palaeontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, examined the dinosaur bones on a recent trip to Patagonia. He agrees with the other palaeontologists.
"This new discovery helps us better understand the diversity of giant carnivorous dinosaurs," says Ryan.
"Even more interesting is the fact that the find contains the remains of multiple individuals of different sizes and ages."
http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1618886.htm
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By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 07 November 2005
01:34 pm ET
A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans for over a million years, according to a new study.
Fortunately for the early humans, the huge primate's diet consisted mainly of bamboo.
Scientists have known about Gigantopithecus blackii since the accidental discovery of some of its teeth on sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy about 80 years ago. While the idea of a giant ape piqued the interest of scientists ? and bigfoot hunters ? around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.
Precise dating
Now Jack Rink, a geochronologist at McMaster University in Ontario, has used a high-precision absolute-dating method to determine that this ape ? the largest primate ever ? roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. By this time, humans had existed for a million years.
"A missing piece of the puzzle has always focused on pin-pointing when Gigantopithecus existed," Rink said. "This is a primate that co-existed with humans at a time when humans were undergoing a major evolutionary change. Guangxhi province in southern China, where some of the Gigantopithecus fossils were found, is the same region where some believe the modern human race originated."
Since the original discovery, scientists have been able to piece together a description of Gigantopithecus using just a handful of teeth and a set of jawbones. It may not be much, but the unusually large size of these teeth indicates they belonged to one big ape.
"The size of these specimens ? the crown of the molar, for instance, measures about an inch across ? helped us understand the extraordinary size of the primate," Rink said.
What happened?
Humans may have helped destroy the ape.
Further studies of the teeth revealed that the ape was an herbivore, and bamboo was probably its favorite meal. Some scientists believe that an appetite focused on bamboo combined with increasing competition from more nimble humans eventually led to the extinction of Gigantopithecus.
While most scientists agree that Gigantopithecus died out long ago, some people ? Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti enthusiasts in particular ? believe that this ape is the source of tales of giant, hairy beasts roaming the woods. These claims are not considered credible by mainstream scientists. There have been cases in which creatures are first known first by their fossil remains and later found living, such as the coelacanth ? a type of fish thought to have died out millions of years ago until it was discovered swimming off the coast of Africa in 1938.
Researchers do not have a full skeleton for Gigantopithecus. But they can fill in the gaps and estimate its size and shape by comparing it to other primates ? those that came before it, coexisted with it, and also modern apes. Currently, scientists are debating over how Gigantopithecus got around ? was it bipedal or did it use its arms to help it walk, like modern chimpanzees and orangutans? The only way to answer this is to collect more bones.
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ROGER SNODGRASS, Monitor Assistant Editor
February 23, 2006
SANTA FE - An early favorite for the top scientific find of the 21st century has to be the surprising discovery of fossils of the little people of Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004.
The most complete specimen of what we now call homo floresiensis is known as LB-1 or more famously, the "hobbit." Also dubbed Flo, she stood three-feet, three- inches tall and is reckoned to be about 18,000 years old.
Although skeptics suspect less dramatic explanations, she may well represent a wholly new kind of miniature human being.
It was not so much her body as her brain that was the subject of Dean Falk's talk Wednesday night, opening a season of public lectures by the Santa Fe Instititute.
An expert in brain evolution and cognition and professor of anthropology at Florida State University, Falk was called in on the eve of the first attempt by National Geographic to review remains discovered by Australian and Indonesian anthropologists.
National Geographic turned to her to explain how a creature with such a small brain, a third the size of our own, could be associated with fireplaces and sophisticated tools.
They also wanted to know where the hobbit might fit into the story of human evolution, which had been thought to be the sole domain of Homo sapiens, since the Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago.
Other bones found at the same time suggest habitation on Flores between 95,000 and 12,000 years ago, when a volcanic eruption may have ended the Hobbit occupation, Falk said.
But somebody or something was making tools on the island that go back nearly a million years altogether.
Falk specializes in reconstructing the shape and structure of primitive brains, by means of an endocast, a model of the inside of the braincase, that provides minute clues and impressions of the outside of the brain.
Using CT scans of the hobbit's skull, and working with engineers at the Mallincrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, Falk has ruled out notions that the hobbits were pygmies or humans with abnormally small skulls.
Small body size may be explained by a well-known dwarfing effect that seems to reduce the size of larger mammals and increase the size of smaller ones. Also dwelling on the island were small elephants and giant rodents.
Brain size is only slightly correlated with intelligence, Falk said.
But the interesting thing about Hobbit brains, she noted, is not the size but the neurological reorganization.
"It didn't get bigger; it got rewired," she said, citing the impressive folds of gray matter at the front of the Hobbit brain. The area, known as Brodmann's Area 10, is associated with planning and interactive responses to the external world.
New analysis to be published soon, she said, will suggest that the creature's unusually enlarged shoulders may be an adaptation for spending a lot of time in trees.
And a creature sleeping in branches during a heavy storm, Falk said, might have been blown out to sea on an uprooted tree, which may be a more plausible explanation for how the island was populated, than by watercraft a million years ago, which is an alternative hypothesis.
Petr Jandacek, a Los Alamos art teacher who has made an educational comic book about the Hobbit, attended Falk's lecture.
"There is an irreducible chance that hobbits are still alive," he said, "because there are 40,000 islands in that area."
That's more than two islands for every person in Los Alamos, he added, all in a region where new fauna are still being discovered.
A large crowd filled the first floor and part of the balcony at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. The lecture was cosponsored by the School of American Research, Los Alamos National Bank and others.
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2006/02/23/headline_news/news02.txt
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30 Jun 2000 AUSTRALIA:
Hunters off the hook.
By Michael Beh.
A BRISBANE researcher is on the verge of debunking claims that Aborigines were solely responsible for the extinction of Australia's megafauna by hunting 18,000 to 30,000 years ago. Queensland Museum's Scott Hocknull, who has just completed his honours thesis, has discovered evidence of dramatic climate change in Australia at the time the giant animals are believed to have died out. For almost 4 million years, giant marsupials, birds and reptiles roamed Australia and the rest of the world. In Australia, the megafauna reached its maximum size about 100,000 years ago with the largest beast a herbivorous wombat-like creature the size of a rhinoceros called Diprotodon optatum. Other megafauna included a sheep-sized echidna, the tree-dwelling marsupial lion, 3m-tall kangaroos and a 600kg carnivorous goanna. Large Tasmanian tigers and devils inhabited the mainland. This year, scientists found one of the most fearsome Australian megafauna was a 3m, 300kg, meat-eating duck. The animal had a large brain and is thought to have hunted large mammals. Most scientists agree that many megafauna species were still around when the Aborigines arrived in Australia more than 40,000 years ago. Australian Museum principal researcher Tim Flannery achieved some notoriety in 1995 with his book The Future Eaters that argued the megafauna species were killed off quite quickly by the Aborigines when they arrived. Mr Hocknull has added to evidence showing the great climatic changes in Australia when the megafauna became extinct. "What I'm finding with my research is that climate has had a profound effect on the environment," Mr Hocknull said. "Before we can come to grips with the effects of humans on the environment, we have to know what was happening before humans arrived. "There's little evidence to suggest a massive extinction, there's little evidence to suggest a gradual extinction. "What that means is you can't pinpoint any period of time when the megafauna went extinct. "The fact is people have jumped on the bandwagon saying humans definitely killed them off." Mr Hocknull has been digging up evidence west of Rockhampton to look at how far rainforests extended and when they began to contract to the their present levels. He has found rainforests existed in the Rockhampton region 2 million to 3 million years ago, and have retracted more than 1000km since. Within a 10sqkm area, he has found evidence of deserts, rain forests and everything in between existing in the past 3 million years. "That just illustrates how fast changes have taken place," Mr Hocknull said. He said that in the northern hemisphere, glaciers created in the ice ages were blamed for the extinction of megafauna such as mastodons and giant elks. In Australia, even though there were few glaciers, similar environmental factors were responsible for megafauna extinction, he argued. "People have always been faced with the conundrum that if there is no ice how do we know the climate change was so dramatic," Mr Hocknull said. "I'm finding that we went from rainforest to open woodlands to savannah to desert in a relatively short period of time." Mr Hocknull believes that hunting may have been the final threat that drove the megafauna to extinction, but only after the effects of climate change.
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20 Jul 2000 CZECH REPUBLIC:
Jackal shot dead in central Moravia.
PRAGUE, July 20 (CTK) - Hunters in central Moravia today shot dead a jackal, believing they had been targeting a fox that had been trying to catch a rabbit. Expert Rudolf Novak afterwards told public Czech Radio that he was sure the killed animal was a jackal. "Unless it escaped from a zoo, this would be the northern most discovery of this type of animal species," Novak said. Workers from the Olomouc zoo told CTK that they did not know of any animals that had escaped. According to Novak, jackals are sometimes found in Hungary, southern Austria and the Southern part of Slovakia, but not in the Czech Republic. He added that he believed the presence of this new predator in the Czech Republic would cause further disruption to the ecological balance of wildlife. The jackal is a member of the dog family and is native to parts of Africa and Asia, but can also occasionally be spotted in southern Europe. It is smaller than a wolf, is an omnivore and is active in twilight and at night.