Prehistoric bear skulls found underwater in Mexico

The ancient remains of four prehistoric bears have been uncovered by archaeologists diving in underwater caves in Mexico.

Scientists think the extinct species lived in the caves in the ice age before they became filled with water.

Human remains were also found.

David Cuen reports.

Watch video at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16632419

Mighty arms helped extinct cats keep a mouthful of fanged teeth

Sabertooth cats and other super-toothy predators apparently possessed mighty arms that they used to help them kill.  The beefy arms would have served to pin down prey and protect the ferocious-looking teeth of the feline predators, which were actually fragile enough to fracture, scientists find.  The finding also may hold for other knife-fanged prehistoric carnivores; long before sabertooth cats evolved, a number of now-extinct toothy hunters once roamed the Earth. These included the nimravids, or false sabertooth cats, which lived from 7 million to 42 million years ago alongside a sister group to cats known as barbourofelids, which lived from 5 million to 20 million years ago.  "If you saw one of these animals you'd probably think it was a cat, but true cats didn't evolve until millions of years later," said researcher Julie Meachen-Samuels, a paleontologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, N.C.

Read more at: http://www.livescience.com/17723-sabertooth-cats-powerful-arms.html

Mastodon Fossils Discovered At Daytona Beach

Prehistoric animal bones found at a Daytona Beach construction site have been confirmed as belonging to a mastodon, officials at the local Museum of Arts and Sciences confirmed on Tuesday.

According to reports by both WESH.com and The Daytona Beach News Journal, the bones were discovered by crews working on a storm water retention pond near Nova Road. The construction site was closed down in order to preserve the fossils — a jawbone, some vertebrae, two tusks, pieces of femur and some additional bones belonging to the large-tusked, Ice Age-era mammal.

“We’re finding some significant pieces — tusks and vertebrae. We don’t know completely what’s down there yet, so it gets more exciting the more we dig,” Museum of Arts and Sciences representative Zach Zacharias told WESH on Wednesday.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

“If the bone fragments add up to a full skeleton, it would only be about the 13th such find in Florida, according to a top official with the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville,” Daytona Beach News Journal Staff Writer Eileen Zaffiro-Kean wrote on November 23.

“It’s not extremely rare, but it’s not common, either,” that official, vertebrate paleontology expert Richard Hulbert, told Zaffiro-Kean. After seeing pictures of the jaw and bone fragments via email, Hulbert said that the specimen “definitely looks like an American mastodon… The size and nature of the teeth are very distinctive. It looks pretty nice. It’s definitely of scientific interest.”

The News Journal notes that since the fossils were found on city property, the city owns them. Hulbert said that he would come to assist at the site if the city were willing to donate the fossils to his museum, and pledged his long-distance assistance should they decline to do so, Zaffiro-Kean said.

“Museum officials, who are being aided by a local amateur paleontologist, are making most of their discoveries on one end of the site. They’re worried about people drifting in and taking souvenirs, and they’ve asked the media not to pinpoint the area where the retention ponds are being built by identifying nearby side streets and landmarks,” she added.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112429190/mastodon-fossils-discovered-at-daytona-beach/index.html

Prehistoric Mite Caught Hitching A Ride On A Spider

Scientists have produced amazing three-dimensional images of a prehistoric mite as it hitched a ride on the back of a 50 million-year-old spider.

At just 176 micrometers long and barely visible to the naked eye, University of Manchester researchers and colleagues in Berlin believe the mite, trapped inside Baltic amber (fossil tree resin), is the smallest arthropod fossil ever to be scanned using X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning techniques.

They say their study – published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters on Wednesday, 9 November – also sets a minimum age of almost 50 million years for the evolution among these mites of phoretic, or hitchhiking, behavior using another animal species.

“CT allowed us to digitally dissect the mite off the spider in order to reveal the important features on the underside of the mite required for identification,” said Dr David Penney, one of the study’s authors based in the Faculty of Life Sciences. “The specimen, which is extremely rare in the fossil record, is potentially the oldest record of the living family Histiostomatidae.

“Amber is a remarkable repository of ecological associations within the fossil record. In many cases organisms died instantaneously and were preserved with lifelike fidelity, still enacting their behavior immediately prior to their unexpected demise. We often refer to this as ‘frozen behavior’ or palaeoethology and such examples can tell us a great deal about interactions in ecosystems of the past. However, most amber fossils consist of individual insects or several insects together but without unequivocal demonstrable evidence of direct interaction. The remarkable specimen we describe in this paper is the kind of find that occurs only once in say a hundred thousand specimens.”

Fellow Manchester biologist Dr Richard Preziosi said: “Phoresy is where one organism uses another animal of a different species for transportation to a new environment. Such behavior is common in several different groups today. The study of fossils such as the one we described can provide important clues as to how far back in geological time such behaviors evolved. The fact that we now have technology that was unavailable just a few years ago means we can now use a multidisciplinary approach to extract the most information possible from such tiny and awkwardly positioned fossils, which previously would have yielded little or no substantial scientific data.”

Read more ...

Ancient monster crocodile sported a shield on its skull

Excavated in Morocco, it was an enormous beast, with head size of probably 6 feet

By Stephanie Pappas
7 November 2011

LAS VEGAS — A newly described species of ancient crocodile with a strange, shield-like skull may have chowed on 13-foot (4-meter) -long fish in Cretaceous-era rivers.

The croc is known by a chunk of skull excavated in Morocco and acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada from a collector. Only now, however, have paleontologists examined the skull and determined that it belonged to a new — and enormous — species.

"It looks like the animal probably had a head size of two meters (6 feet)," said study researcher Casey Holliday, a professor of anatomical sciences at the University of Missouri who analyzed the specimen.

Even more intriguingly, Holliday said, the animal had a shield-like structure on the top of its skull that would have supported skin and blood vessels much like the frills of horned dinosaurs such as triceratops. It's likely that "shieldcroc," as the new fossil is known, would have used this structure for display, Holliday said.

Giant crocodiles
Other specimens of species closely related to shieldcroc have been described, but not since the 1920s, Holliday said. And because those specimens were found by German archaeologists, they ended up getting blown up in the bombings of World War II.

The newly surfaced chunk of crocodile skull reveals that shieldcroc was a member of a group called the eusuchians, a lineage that includes modern crocodiles and alligators. Shieldcroc, which lived about 100 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period, is the first confirmed eusuchian ever found in Africa.

"There's an argument as to where modern crocs really evolved," Holliday said. "This kind of pulls that equation closer to the Europe/Mediterranean region."

Extrapolating from the size of shieldcroc's braincase suggests that the animal grew to lengths of 50 to 60 feet (15 to 18 meters), a size that Holliday called "pretty ridiculous." More likely, he said, those proportions are off and shieldcroc was closer to 30 to 36 feet (9 to 11 meters) long.

That's comparable to another ancient African giant, " SuperCroc," or Sarcosuchus imperator, a 40-foot (12 meter) bruiser discovered in Niger.

Shieldcroc's relatively delicate, duck-like jaws were likely not equipped for any ultra-dramatic feats like fighting T. rex, Holliday said. But the crocodile was still pretty fearsome, said study researcher Nick Gardner, an undergraduate at Marshall University in West Virginia. Shieldcroc shared the river with lungfish and ancient fish called Coelacanths that could have grown to be 13 feet (4 m) long. It's very possible that shieldcroc considered these monster fish to be prey, Gardner told LiveScience.

"These (fish) are big," Gardner said. "They're not pushovers."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45193564/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TrhKmHK0Nic

Prehistoric Pig Remains Found At Texas Excavation Site

Construction workers excavating the site of a new high-explosive pressing facility in Amarillo, Texas, discovered the remains of an extinct, prehistoric pig.

According to Bobby Cervantes of the Amarillo Globe-News, workers at the Pantex Plant discovered the fragmented remains embedded approximately eight feet down in the walls of the site after returning to the location one morning.

“If we’d have taken another bucket of dirt out of the wall of that pit, we’d have never known they (the bones) were there,” Project Contractor Don Lankford said. “The next morning, the light was hitting the bones just right, and one of the workers spotted them.”

Lankford told Cervantes that the large excavator bucket used by the crew would have definitely destroyed the bone fragments had it taken another chunk out of the wall.

An Associated Press (AP) report notes that “Dr. Gerald Schultz, a geology professor at West Texas A&M University in nearby Canyon, identified the bones as belonging to a Platygonus, an extinct prehistoric pig related to a modern javelina. The professor says Platygonus became extinct at least 11,000 years ago, but the bones could be as old as 23 million years old.”

B&W Pantex spokesman Bill Cunningham told the Amarillo Globe-News that Plant historian Monica Graham, a wildlife biologist, and a geologist worked together to excavate the bones.

Reporter Eric Ross of Amarillo television station NewsChannel 10 said that the discovery was “a big find… this could only be the second time a peccary fossil has been discovered in our area.”

Ross added that Pantex told the station that Pantex was “looking into the possibility of displaying them at the Panhandle Plains Museum,” which is located on the West Texas A&M University campus. Graham told the television station that pictures would be sent to the museum, and for the time being, the fossils would be preserved at Pantex.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112416412/prehistoric-pig-remains-found-at-texas-excavation-site/index.html

The 14 foot wombat: First complete skeleton of prehistoric monster found in Australia

The diprotodon weighed three tons and was 14ft long

It lived between 25,000 and two million years ago
By Richard Shears

It did not eat flesh, but whatever got in its way would have been trampled to death, scientists agreed today after the first complete skeleton of a prehistoric monster was found in Australia.

Known as a diprotodon and likened to a giant wombat, weighing three tons and stretching up to 14ft long, it roamed the Australian continent between 25,000 and two million years ago.

A reproduction of aboriginal rock art depicting a diprotodon. It was found in Northern Australia and is believed to be 10,000 years old

Reconstruction: The first complete skeleton of a prehistoric monster has been found by scientists in north-west Queensland, Australia

What is known, from a fragment of bone from the remains of another diprotodon discovered in New South Wales, is that these creatures lived on the continent at the same time as the early Aborigines

A small hole was found in that fragment, suggesting that the animal was brought down by a spear.


But that was just one bone and, until the latest discovery in north-west Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria region, a complete skeleton had not been found.

'We hope we will now be able to reconstruct the bones, put them into their original positions, to give us a pretty good idea of what these creatures looked like,' said Professor Michael Archer of the Australian Museum, who has travelled to a cattle station where the skeleton was found.

Although artists have painted what scientists believe would be images of the diprotodon, the discovery of the complete skeleton will help in revealing more of the creature's shape and size.


'What we're seeing here is the biggest marsupial (an animal that carries its young in a pouch) that ever lived in the world - a three-ton monster,' said Professor Archer.

'This here in Queensland was its last stand, judging by the relatively undamaged complete skeleton.'

Professor Archer said it was unusual for all the bones of ancient creatures to be found in one place

'All the bones are not necessarily in their right position, but probably the whole skeleton of this giant is in this one spot where it fell maybe 50,000 years ago.


'There was just one little bone sticking out - and then we found the rest.'

Diprotodons were widespread across Australia when the first indigenous people arrived some 50,000 years ago from what is today South-East Asia.

The heavily-built animals fed on grasses but they might not have been too intelligent - although having an oversized skull, it was filled with numerous air spaces.

Until the Queensland discovery, the most complete specimen was found at Tambar Springs in New South Wales.

Scientists were excited to discover that on one rib there was a small square hole, believed to have been made by a spear while the bone was still fresh.

Now palaeontologists are hoping that more clues about the creature will be found in the newly-discovered Queensland bones.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2011107/Giant-wombat-skeleton-Australia-Prehistoric-Diprotodon-14-foot.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Birch Mouse Ancestor Discovered in Inner Mongolia Is New Species of Rare 'Living Fossil'

Paleontologist Yuri Kimura, Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
identified a new species of birch mice, Sicista primus, from 17 tiny teeth.
A single molar is about the size of half a grain of rice. The teeth, however,
are distinctive among the various genera of rodents known as Dipodidae.
Cusps, valleys, ridges and other distinguishing characteristics on the
surface of the teeth are identifiable through a microscope.
(Credit: Yuri Kimura/Southern Methodist University)

ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — Tiny fossil teeth discovered in Inner Mongolia are a new species of birch mouse, indicating that ancestors of the small rodent are much older than previously reported, according to paleontologist Yuri Kimura, Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Fossils of the new species were discovered in sediments that are 17 million years old, said Kimura, who identified the new species and named it Sicista primus to include the Latin word for "first."

Previously the oldest prehistoric ancestor of the modern-day birch mouse was one that inhabited Inner Mongolia 8 million years ago.

Adding 9 million years to the ancestry of the rodent family that includes birch mice and jumping mice distinguishes this genus, Sicista, as a "living fossil," Kimura said. That places the genus among some of the most unique rodents on earth -- those whose ancestry spans 2 to 3 times the average, she said.

Kimura identified Sicista primus from 17 tiny teeth, whose size makes them difficult to find. A single molar is about the size of half a grain of rice. The teeth, however, are distinctive among the various genera of rodents known as Dipodidae. Cusps, valleys, ridges and other distinguishing characteristics on the surface of the teeth are identifiable through a microscope.

"We are very lucky to have these," Kimura said. "Paleontologists usually look for bones, but a mouse is very tiny and its bones are very thin and fragile. The teeth, however, are preserved by enamel. Interestingly, small mammal teeth are very diverse in terms of their structure, so from that we can identify a species."

Kimura reported the new species in the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften. Images of the research and expedition are posted on the SMU Research flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52146845@N06/sets/72157626764403486/). SMUVideo's "Inner Mongolia yields 'living fossil'" featuring Kimura discussing the research is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khkx11WlKaw).

An SMU doctoral student in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Kimura was part of the international team that discovered the fossils during expeditions to Inner Mongolia in 2004, 2005 and 2007.

Microscopic evidence of a living fossil

The new fossils of Sicista primus from the Early Miocene age are also now the earliest known record of Sicista, the birch mouse genus that comprises 13 modern and 7 fossil species, said Kimura. As a result, Sicista now boasts the most ancient ancestry of the 326 genera in the largest rodent suborder to which it belongs, Myomorpha. The suborder includes laboratory mice and rats.

"The birch mouse is a rare case of a small mammal genus persisting from the Early Miocene without significant morphological changes," Kimura said in reporting the findings.

Rodents, both modern and prehistoric, rank as the most prolific mammals on earth. After the reign of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, rodents evolved and dispersed worldwide during the Cenozoic, the "Age of Mammals." They comprise about 42 percent of all living mammals. Scientists know now that only 1.5 percent of modern rodent genera, however, go as far back as the Early Miocene or older.

"Diversity within a rodent genus is not unusual, but the long record of the genus Sicista, first recognized at 17 million years ago, is unusual," said Kimura. "The discovery of Early Miocene S. primus reveals that Sicista is fundamental to understanding how a long-lived genus persisted among substantially fast-evolving rodent groups."

Birch mice migrated from Asia to North America

Previously the record for the oldest species of Sicista belonged to an 8 million-year-old species identified in Eurasia, Kimura said.

In identifying the new species, Kimura also reverses the long-held hypothesis that ancestors of birch mice migrated from North America to Asia. That hypothesis has been based on a 14.8 million-year-old specimen from South Dakota, which was identified in 1977 as the separate rodent genus Macrognathomys. Kimura's analysis, however, concludes that Macrognathomys is actually Sicista. For that reason, she concluded, Sicista first inhabited the forests and grasslands of prehistoric Asia and then dispersed to North America via the Bering Land Bridge, Kimura said.

In a comparison of the molars and premolars from Macrognathomys and Sicista primus, Kimura reported finding 12 shared dental characteristics. In addition, phylogenetic analysis to identify evolutionary relationships indicated that both belong to the same genus, Sicista, she said.

Reconnaissance of earlier Central Asiatic Expedition localities yields small mammals

The teeth of Sicista primus were discovered in fine sediments gathered from Gashunyinadege, a fossil locality in the central region of Inner Mongolia.

Gashunyinadege is one of several fossil localities near Tunggur, a fossil site discovered in the 1920s by the Central Asiatic Expedition, which was led by Roy Chapman Andrews from the American Museum of Natural History.

Kimura is a member of an international scientific team sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The team's expeditions have been led by paleontologists Qiu Zhuding, IVPP; Wang Xiaoming, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and Li Qiang, IVPP. Their expeditions retrace important classic localities, as well as prospect new fossil localities.

Kimura and other members of the team discovered the birch mouse fossils by first prospecting Gashunyinadege for small mammal fossils visible to the naked eye. Those fossils indicated the possibility of even smaller mammal fossils, so the team gathered 6,000 kilograms, more than 13,000 pounds, of Early Miocene sediment. Using standing water from recent rains, they washed the sediments repeatedly through continually smaller screens to separate out small fossils. Bags of concentrate containing particles the size of mouse teeth were returned to IVPP laboratories to hunt for fossils with a microscope.

The research was funded by the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at SMU, Dallas Paleontological Society, Geological Society of America, Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110524153420.htm

Fossil of Giant Ancient Sea Predator Discovered

Anomalocaridids had long, spiny head limbs presumably used to snag
prey, and a series of blade-like filaments in segments across the animal's
back, which scientists think might have functioned as gills.
(Credit: Esben Horn)

ScienceDaily (May 26, 2011) — Paleontologists have discovered that a group of remarkable ancient sea creatures existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought, thanks to extraordinarily well-preserved fossils discovered in Morocco.

The creatures, known as anomalocaridids, were already thought to be the largest animals of the Cambrian period, known for the "Cambrian Explosion" that saw the sudden appearance of all the major animal groups and the establishment of complex ecosystems about 540 to 500 million years ago. Fossils from this period suggested these marine predators grew to be about two feet long. Until now, scientists also thought these strange invertebrates -- which had long spiny head limbs presumably used to snag worms and other prey, and a circlet of plates around the mouth -- died out at the end of the Cambrian.

Now a team led by former Yale researcher Peter Van Roy (now at Ghent University in Belgium) and Derek Briggs, director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, has discovered a giant fossilized anomalocaridid that measures one meter (more than three feet) in length. The anomalocaridid fossils reveal a series of blade like filaments in each segment across the animal's back, which scientists think might have functioned as gills.

In addition, the creature dates back to the Ordovician period, a time of intense biodiversification that followed the Cambrian, meaning these animals existed for 30 million years longer than previously realized.

"The anomalocaridids are one of the most iconic groups of Cambrian animals," Briggs said. "These giant invertebrate predators and scavengers have come to symbolize the unfamiliar morphologies displayed by organisms that branched off early from lineages leading to modern marine animals, and then went extinct. Now we know that they died out much more recently than we thought."

The specimens are just part of a new trove of fossils from Morocco that includes thousands of examples of soft-bodied marine fauna dating back to the early Ordovician period, 488 to 472 million years ago. Because hard shells fossilize and are preserved more readily than soft tissue, scientists had an incomplete and biased view of the marine life that existed during the Ordovician period before the recent discoveries in Morocco. The animals found in Morocco inhabited a muddy sea floor in fairly deep water, and were trapped by sediment clouds that buried them and preserved their soft bodies.

"The new discoveries in Morocco indicate that animals characteristic of the Cambrian, such as the anomalocaridids, continued to have a considerable impact on the biodiversity and ecology of marine communities many millions of years later," Van Roy said.

The paper appears in the May 26 issue of the journal Nature.

This research was supported by a National Geographic Society Research and Exploration grant and by Yale University.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110525131709.htm

Woolly mammoth may have interbred with elephants

A model of a wooly mammoth stands at the exhibition
'Ice Age Giants' in Garding, Germany, on May 31.

Newscom

Woolly mammoth roamed the planet for more than a million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago.

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor / June 2, 2011

The woolly mammoth may surprisingly have regularly interbred with a completely different and much larger elephant species, researchers now find.

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) roamed the planet for more than a million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago, although dwarf mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3,700 years ago.

Although woolly mammoths lived in the cold of the tundra, the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) preferred the more temperate regions of southern and central North America. The Columbians were much larger than woollies, with Columbian males reaching one-and-a-half to two times that of woolly males.

Gallery: African elephants

"We are talking about two very physically different species here," said researcher Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. "You have roughly 1 million years of separation between the two, with the Columbian mammoth likely derived from an early migration into North America approximately 1.5 million years ago, and their woolly counterparts emigrating to North America some 400,000 years ago."

Poinar and his colleagues investigated the evolution of Columbian mammoths by analyzing DNA retrieved from the tusks, bone and teeth of two approximately 11,000-year-old fossil specimens, one found in the Huntington Reservoir in Utah and the other found near Rawlins, Wyo. The researchers concentrated on the genomes of the mitochondria, the "powerhouses" of the cells, which have their own unique DNA and are inherited from the mother.

Surprisingly, they discovered the mitochondrial genome of the Columbian mammoth was nearly indiscernible from that of its northern woolly counterparts. [Album: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]

"At first I thought, 'Oh crap, there's contamination of some sort,'" Poinar said.

However, any minor contamination they found could not explain the extensive genetic evidence they uncovered, and they replicated their results in an independent lab. "I think we were very lucky," Poinar told LiveScience.

"We think we may be looking at a genetic hybrid," said researcher Jacob Enk, a graduate student in the McMaster Ancient DNA Center.

When glacial times got nasty, woollies likely moved to more pleasant conditions southward, where they came into contact with the Columbian mammoths.

"Living African elephant species hybridize where their ranges overlap, with the bigger species out-competing the smaller for mates," Enk added. The offspring are perfectly fertile, Poinar added.

Since woollies and Columbians overlapped in time and space, it is not unlikely that they interbred in much the same manner.

"It reminds me a bit of high-school days — the larger males are more successful at meeting women across the dance floor than the rest of us," Poinar said.

These findings could explain why some mammoth fossils had features intermediate between woollies and Columbians, although the genomes of both species should be sequenced to tell for sure. The researchers also want to look at Columbian mammoth specimens from farther south where no woollies ever ventured, to get an idea of what nonhybrid samples might look like.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 31 in the journal Genome Biology.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0602/Woolly-mammoth-may-have-interbred-with-elephants

Bones of elephant ancestors discovered in Oman

Fossil discovered in Dhofar region in south of Oman.

Omani Barytherium was found in Dhofar by a joint team from the Ministry of Heritage and Culture, Stony Brook University, US, and Sultan Qaboos University

Staff Report
Published: 17:13 May 21, 2011

Muscat: A team of geologists from the Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) have confirmed discovery of remains of the oldest ancestors of elephant (Barhtyerium), according to a press release from the university Saturday.

The Omani Barytherium, the first one to be found in Oman, was discovered in Aidum area in Dhofar by a joint team of archaeologists from the Ministry of Heritage and Culture and Stony Brook University, US, and geologists from SQU.

The archaeological team was led by Dr Erick Seifert from the Stony Brook University.

The SQU team of geologists, including Prof Dr Sobhi Nasir and Dr Abdulrahman Al Harthy joined the Heritage Ministry consultant at the site in south of the country and assisted in establishing the discovery.

The joint team found a huge area of elephant bones, known as elephant grabs, and collected large quantities of bones to be identified in a laboratory at the SQU.

The group of researchers from SQU, SBU and the Ministry of Heritage are still working on these bones and are expecting new discoveries in the area.

The team has said that this finding is extremely important as it gives the first evidence of the oldest ancestor of elephant found in the world.

The scientists named the new finding as Barytherium Omansi.

Barytherium (meaning heavy beast) is a genus of an extinct family (Barytheriidae) of primitive proboscidean that lived during the late Eocene and early Oligocene in North Africa. The Barytheriidae were the first large size proboscideans to appear in the fossil records and were characterised by a strong sexual dimorphism.

The only known species within this family is Barytherium grave, found at the beginning of the 20th century in the Fayum, Egypt.

More complete specimens have been found since then, at Dor el Talha Libya. In some respects, these animals would have looked similar to a modern Asian Elephant, but with a more slender build.

Eight tusks

The most visible difference, however, would have been the tusks Barytherium had eight very short tusks, four each in the upper and lower jaws, which resembled those of a modern hippopotamus more than those of an elephant. The upper pairs were vertical, while the lower pairs projected forwards from the mouth horizontally. Together, these would have created a shearing action for cropping plants.

Palaeontologists know a lot more about Barytherium's tusks, which tend to preserve better in the fossil record than soft tissue, than they do about its trunk.

This prehistoric elephant had eight short, stubby tusks, four in its upper jaw and four in its lower jaw, but to date no one has unearthed any evidence for its proboscis (which may or may not have looked like that of a modern elephant).

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/oman/bones-of-elephant-ancestors-discovered-in-oman-1.810855

Weird marsupial fossils found

"An artist’s illustration of a forest at
Riversleigh in prehistoric Miocene times."
Image: Dorothy Dunphy

Wednesday, 20 April 2011
The University of New South Wales

Fossils of bizarre lizard-like, snail-eating marsupials have been discovered by UNSW palaeontologists in an ancient fossil field in the Riversleigh World Heritage area in Queensland. The fossils date back 10 to 17 million years ago.

This ferret-size mammal - now formally named Malleodectes, meaning "hammer-biter "- had an enormous blunt tooth in each side of its upper jaw, says Dr Rick Arena, lead author of the study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"At first, the function of these teeth was a mystery because we were unaware of any other mammal that had hammer-teeth like this," says Dr Arena, of the UNSW Evolution of Earth & Life Systems Research Group. 

That was until co-author Dr Scott Hocknull, of the Queensland Museum, noticed the striking similarities to a modern Australian lizard, the pink-tongued skink (Cyclodomorphus gerrardii).

“This rainforest skink has an almost identical giant, hammer-tooth in its dentition and in this case we know what it’s used for: crushing the hard shells of snails, one of the main foods of this rainforest skink,” says Dr Hocknull.

"It appears Malleodectes evolved millions of years ago to exploit the ecological niche occupied today by these specialised lizards," says Dr Arena.

The researchers say the similarity between the teeth of the fossil marsupials and the living skink is a remarkable example of evolutionary convergence. Although from very different groups of animals, these marsupials and this lizard have independently developed a similar solution to the same challenge - how to crush hard shells to be able to swallow tasty snails.

While many examples of evolutionary convergence between marsupials and placental mammals have been found on other continents – one of the most familiar being the recently extinct dog-like thylacines - this is the first time a marsupial has been found with dental adaptations most closely resembling those of a lizard.

Malleodectes eventually became extinct at some point after 10 million years ago, when the Australian continent began to respond to rapid climate change.

“It’s possible that species of Malleodectes may have survived for a bit longer in rainforest communities in eastern Australia and here found themselves in competition for snails with the similarly-specialised ancestors of the pink-tongued skinks," says Professor Mike Archer, a co-author.  "If this did happen, clearly, for whatever reason, these extraordinary mammals lost out to the lizards.”

---

Editor's Note: Please refer to the University of New South Wales website for more details.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20112004-22092-2.html

Fossil from 275 million years ago shows oldest abscess

19 April 2011

The first-known occurrence of an oral infection has been found in a 275-million-year-old fossil.

The Labidosaurus hamatus fossil, whose detailed analysis using X-rays is described in Naturwissenschaften journal, shows signs of an abscess.

The animal was among the first to have just one set of teeth, rather than continuously replacing them.

The adaptation to a plant-based diet would have made them more susceptible, as humans are, to tooth decay and loss.

The find predates the previous earliest-known example of tooth decay by some 200 million years, and also represents the oldest-known infection in a terrestrial vertebrate.

L hamataus was one of the first fully terrestrial reptiles, and with the evolution from a watery to land-based life came a change in diet.

For millions of years, the animal's predecessors had teeth that continuously replaced themselves; new teeth grew into the inner side of the jaw and, when the loosely-connected outer teeth fell out, rose up to take their place.

However, the diet of tough plant matter that land-based reptiles began to eat did not lend itself to weak teeth, so animals like L hamatus over millions of years evolved more deeply-anchored teeth.

Robert Reisz and colleagues from the University of Toronto Mississauga obtained a L hamatus fossil recovered in what is now Texas. Using a commercial computed tomagraphy machine - which provided detailed X-ray data - they were able to image the interior of the fossil's jaw.

They found evidence of a long-lasting bacterial infection and tooth loss - an abscess.

It seems that in animals without the continuous replacement of teeth, oral infections caused by bacteria - which had long since evolved to take up residence in reptiles' mouths - were likely to get worse, rather than be pushed out along with old teeth.

The authors speculate that "our own human system of [having two sets of teeth through life], although of obvious advantage because of its precise dental occlusion and extensive oral processing, is more susceptible to infection than that of our distant ancestors that had a continuous cycle of tooth replacement."

That is, humans have upper and lower teeth that neatly interlock, making it easier to chew, but it is our reptilian forebears' change to firmly fixed teeth that makes us prone to cavities.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13131533
(Via Dawn Holloway)

Fossilised spider 'biggest on record'

The legs would have spanned up to 15cm, front to back
(scale-bar: 5mm)

20 April 2011
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists say a fossilised spider from the Inner Mongolian region of China is the biggest yet found.

The female, which lived about 165 million years ago, belongs to a collection of spiders well known today - the golden orb weavers.

These creatures make webs from a very tough and distinctively golden silk.

The researchers tell the journal Biology Letters that Nephila jurassica, as they have called their specimen, would have had a leg span of some 15cm.

"She is the largest known fossil spider," said Professor Paul Selden from the University of Kansas, US.

"Her body is not the biggest, but if you add in her long legs then she's the largest," he told BBC News.

Today's Nephila species are found around the globe in tropical and sub-tropical regions.

Until this new fossil turned up in Inner Mongolia, the most ancient example from this grouping, or genus, was about 35 million years old.

So, this discovery pushes the existence of the Nephila back to the Jurassic Period, making them the longest ranging spider genus known.

No-one can say for sure how this particular arachnid met her end, but she may have succumbed to a natural catastrophe.

The spider was encased in volcanic ash at the bottom of what would have been a lake. Perhaps the ash fall from an eruption pulled her from her web and smothered her. Whatever the circumstances of the spider's end, the preservation of detail today is exquisite.

"You see not just the hairs on the legs but little things like the trichobothria which are very, very fine. They're used to detect air vibrations. There's a very distinct group of them and they're a very distinct size which is typical of this genus, Nephila," Professor Selden explained.

Nephila females today weave some of the largest orb webs known, up to 1.5m in diameter. The great prowess of the females stands in stark contrast to the rather diminutive males of the genus. Their small form makes the females look like giants.

This disparity in size is an example of what biologists refer to as extreme sexual dimorphism.

Professor Selden and his colleagues are keen to find out whether this characteristic holds true for the ancient Nephila, too.

"The previous oldest Nephilid is a male from the Cretaceous Period found in Spain. That male is normal sized, whereas in the present day the females are giants," the Gulf-Hedberg distinguished professor of invertebrate paleontology at Kansas said.


"So, it looks like we may have this dimorphism going back this great length of time. We'd like to find a male in the deposit to confirm this. All the evidence would suggest the male would be normal size, but we haven't yet located one."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13134505

Ancient lakes show when eukaryotic life left the sea

18:00 13 April 2011 by Colin Barras

Pools of water on land were a lot livelier 1 billion years ago than previously thought.

It is generally assumed that life began in the ocean around 3.8 billion years ago, then moved onto land. Until now, there had been little evidence to suggest this landward migration happened before half a billion years ago. The discovery of eukaryote cells in 1-billion-year-old lake sediment looks set to change that.

Paul Strother at Boston College in Weston, Massachusetts, and colleagues discovered cyst-like bubbles made of organic matter in 1 to 1.2-billion-year-old lake deposits. The bubbles were packed full of fossilised cells, and found in a number of locations across the north-west of Scotland, UK.

Strother says the cells, which appear to be going through vegetative reproduction, show a level of structural complexity "beyond that seen in bacteria" but characteristic of eukaryotes – one of the three domains of life. This suggests the primitive relatives of all animals, plants and fungi had left the oceans and moved into terrestrial waters twice as long ago as thought.

Non-marine sediment

Palaeontologists contacted by New Scientist for comment agreed. "They most certainly appear to be eukaryotic, and the non-marine nature of the encompassing sediments seems well established," says Andrew Knoll at Harvard University. "Previous to this, the oldest clearly non-marine eukaryotes may have been [roughly 540-million-year-old] Cambrian spores."

Emmanuelle Javaux at the University of Liège, Belgium, calls it "a significant discovery". The age of the rocks puts them "near the beginning of diversification of eukaryotic supergroups, and is an important new element for improving our understanding of early terrestrialisation processes in general – and evolution of the eukaryotes in particular."

Eukaryotes may not have been the sole colonisers of land at the time. There is also evidence that cyanobacteria – some of the earliest known forms of life – evolved first in fresh water, before moving to the ocean.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09943

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20373-ancient-lakes-show-when-eukaryotic-life-left-the-sea.html

Dinosaurs were active both day and night, study claims

14 April 2011

Some dinosaurs did their hunting at night, new research suggests.

Studies of the eyes of existing birds and reptiles with different daily activity patterns were compared with similar parts in dinosaur fossils.

The results suggests that small, meat-eating dinosaurs were nocturnal; large, plant-eating dinosaurs tended to forage both during the day and at night.

The Science study also challenges the notion that mammals' nocturnal nature evolved to avoid day-active dinosaurs.

Lars Schmitz and Ryosuke Motani of the University of California Davis have been looking at the eye parts of dinosaurs, and their modern-day descendants the lizards and birds, for a number of years.

They have been trying to determine just how big and how light-sensitive dinosaurs' eyes would have been. 
That in turn would be an indication of whether they were active at night; until now the assumption has been that dinosaurs were diurnal, or primarily active in the daytime only.

However, fossils give no indication of how large dinosaurs' pupils would have been - an indication of how much light they could gather up, and thus of whether they were nocturnal "night stalkers".

A prior study in the Journal of Morphology by the pair that showed that the size of the "scleral ring" - a ring of bone that covers the iris and pupil in many animals - is a good indicator of the size of the pupil.

"We measured living lizards and birds to test if you can use these bone parts to distinguish the nocturnals from diurnals," Dr Schmitz explained to BBC News.

"We picked species for which we know their activity patterns - we know if they are nocturnal, diurnal or both - and then we found we could tell them apart [on the basis of their ocular bone sizes].

"Once we had that established we applied what we learned from the living species to the dinosaurs."

The pair measured the eye socket size and scleral ring size of 33 dinosaur fossils, finding that dinosaurs seemed to be busy at a variety of times of day and night.

"Contrary to what was believed - that most dinosaurs were diurnal - we saw pretty much everything: we had diurnal, nocturnal and species active both day and night, that was the first surprise," Dr Schmitz said.

"The activity patterns depend essentially on what they do for a living - what the ecology is. Small carnivores like velociraptor tended to be nocturnal or active day and night; we didn't have a diurnal carnivore in our analysis.

"Large herbivores, they were almost exclusively day- and night-active."

Dr Schmitz said this was probably because larger animals needed to forage longer to support their large sizes.

The find also casts doubt on the idea that mammals - who in modern times are predominantly nocturnal - evolved their activity patterns to avoid being targeted by day-active dinosaurs.

"We now know that dinosaurs were active at night as well, so the whole story is much more complicated," Dr Schmitz said.

"We don't even know if early mammals were truly nocturnal; we have do a lot more research to understand how nocturnality in mammals evolved."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13083990
(Via Dawn Holloway)

Dinosaurs a new addition at Bridport museum

3:30pm Wednesday 6th April 2011

STAFF at Bridport Museum have thrown open their doors for the season with new displays – including a plesiosaur skeleton.

They have revamped upstairs display areas and mounted new exhibitions at the centre in South Street.

The new features include a Wedding Wonderland exhibition to mark the royal wedding and the plesiosaur skeleton.

Curator Emily Hicks said: “We have been busy over the winter period redecorating some of the upstairs display areas and mounting the new exhibitions for the season “The most recent addition to our Jurassic Coast gallery is a large plesiosaur skeleton.

“Mounting this has been a mammoth undertaking involving rebuilding a wall to take the weight of the display and its case.”

She added: “Our aim this season is to make learning more fun and hands-on for our younger visitors. “There will be Victorian costumes to try on, as well as slates to write with and games to play.

“There is also a new interactive in the Roman galleries with Roman toys and a mosaic to design.”

New exhibitions include Bridport Faces, which features portraits of prominent town and country people from the museum’s collection.

• On Wednesday, April 13 there will be a free mask-making day at the museum, between 10am and 5pm. It is suitable for all ages.

http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/8955559.Dinosaurs_a_new_addition_at_Bridport_museum/
(Via Dark Dorset)

Prehistoric reptile skin secrets revealed in new image

23 March 2011

By Mark Kinver
Science and environment reporter, BBC News

A unique image, for the first time, has mapped organic compounds that are still surviving in a 50-million-year-old sample of reptile skin.

The infra-red picture reveals the chemical profile of the skin, offering an insight into how it was preserved.

A team of UK scientists say the sample was so well preserved that it was hard to tell the difference between the fossil and the fresh samples.

The details appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"It is a relatively new technique - I think we are the first people to apply it to palaeontology," said co-author Roy Wogelius, a geochemist from the University of Manchester, UK.

He told BBC News that the technology allows non-destructive analysis, meaning that it could be used on rare, valuable museum specimens.

"Now we can apply this organic technique [it] means that there is an awful lot of material that we can analyse in ways people did not realise were possible."

Possible specimens could include invertebrates, marine creatures and plant material, Dr Wogelius said.

He explained that the the infra-red mapping technique worked in a manner that was similar to a record player.

"What you do is you take something that transmits light, so if you take a very small needle - about the size of an old phonograph stylus - and make it so it can transmit light," he revealed.

"You can shine light down through the needle and then when the needle is in contact with the specimen's surface, a little of that light will be absorbed - that is the signal that we use.

"When there is a little more absorption at a certain frequency, that is a fingerprint for a particular organic compound."

Dr Wogelius explained that the team of UK and US researchers had attempted to use the technology before, on a sample from a sample known as "dino-mummy", a 67-million-year-old fossil that still had much of its soft tissue intact.

"This was one of the best preserved dinosaurs discovered, and we were able to show that there was organic compound from the skin remaining (on the fossil)," he observed.

"The problem was that the (sample) fell apart so easily, we could not map anything. So while we were confident that what we had was skin residue, we just could not see if there was any biological structure there."

Prehistoric 'whiff'

With the latest sample, Dr Wogelius said that the preservation was both remarkable and, perhaps more importantly, solid.

"It was also flat which made it very, very convenient to map it," he added.

"So we took this new technology... and the detail of what we were able to reveal was quite striking."

Using the infra-red technique, as well as a series of X-rays, the team were able to confirm that soft tissue was present on the fossil.

They were also able to offer a hypothesis on how the tissue had survived for 50 million years.

The details from the study suggest that when skin's organic compounds began to break down, they formed a chemical bond with trace metals that, under certain circumstances, then go on to build a "bridge" with the surrounding minerals.

A result of this process meant that the skin and remaining soft tissue was protected from further decomposition or further erosion.

"These new infra-red and X-ray methods reveal intricate chemical patterns that have been overlooked by traditional methods for decades," Dr Wogelius explained.

"We have learned that some of these compounds, if the chemistry is just right, can give us a bit of a whiff of the chemistry of these ancient organisms."

He went on to say that the team's findings had offered an insight into a number of area.

"By doing the infra-red analysis, we get some detail about the soft tissue that remains," he said.

"In fact, the chemical remains - in terms of the organic compounds - very closely resemble what we get when we look at modern gecko skin. That means that some of the organic components have been conserved over that period of time.

"Some of the trace metal chemistry is also original to the organism, and that give us hope in terms of understanding some bio-metallic complexes, in particular understanding the colouration and pigmentation of the skin.

"It is very exciting because we can start to pull out more detail."

Dr Wogelius said that this sort of information could unlock a better understanding of a range of research avenues, including prehistoric creatures' diets.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12816862

Biggest-Ever Bunny Didn't Hop, Had No Enemies

A newly found species of rabbit, Nuralagus rex, weighed in at over 26.4

pounds and lived three to five million years ago on the small island of Minorca.

Meike Köhler

No floppy-eared Easter-type bunny, this rabbit had small ears, smallish eyes and enormous heft.

By Jennifer Viegas
Mon Mar 21, 2011 03:00 PM ET

THE GIST

• The world's largest known rabbit lived three to five million years ago on the island of Minorca.
• It weighed over 26.4 pounds, had no enemies, and did not hop.
• The rabbit exemplifies what's known as the "island rule."

An enormous bunny that lived three to five million years ago was so hefty -- six times the size of most rabbits today -- that it didn't hop and had no enemies.

The new species, dubbed the Minorcan King of the Rabbits (Nuralagus rex), weighed in at over 26.4 pounds and lived on the small island of Minorca.

"N. rex was a very robust and peculiar rabbit," project leader Josep Quintana told Discovery News. "Surely he was a very calm and peaceful animal that moved with slow, but powerful, movements."

Quintana, a scientist at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology, and colleagues Meike Kohler and Salvador Moya-Sola describe the giant fossil rabbit in a Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper. They believe the rabbit lost the ability to hop, because the long, springy spine typical of modern bunnies was replaced by a short, stiff backbone.

The researchers think N. rex spent most of its days peacefully digging, searching for roots and tubers to eat.

"The ancestors of N. rex arrived at Minorca during the Messinian crisis 5.3 million years ago," Quintana said. "During this geological time, the Mediterranean Sea dried up and the Balearic islands connected with the surrounding mainland (of Europe and Africa), so the proto-Nuralagus rex arrived walking to Minorca."

When the seawater returned and Minorca returned to its island status, the rabbit found itself with no predators. Over time, it grew to become 10 times the size of its now-extinct mainland cousin. Other inhabitants of the island at the time included a bat, a large dormouse and a giant tortoise.

With no need for defense, the rabbit lost visual and hearing acuity. Its eye socket reduced in size over time, as did its ears.

The changes, especially the increase in body size, add to the growing evidence for what's known as "the island rule." Simply put, this states that when on islands, big animals often tend to become smaller and small animals frequently tend to grow larger.

On the small side of that equation, other islands have been home to tiny elephants and even, in the case of Homo floresiensis, tiny humans.

"It is as if nature experimented with form and function, not without a wicked sense of humor," Lucja Fostowicz-Frelik, an American Museum of Natural History paleontologist, told Discovery News.

Fostowicz-Frelik continued that the newly found rabbit "is just another manifestation of the island rule ... We know that their closest relations, rodents, did produce some gigantic forms, not necessarily on islands, which averaged several hundred kilos. Now we see that the lagomorphs (the animal order that includes rabbits, hares and pikas) did not escape the trend."

Brian Kraatz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, agrees.

"There is an underlying assumption that rabbits appeared some 40 million years ago and have been perfectly happy to stay just about the same," Kraatz told Discovery News. "This new species is interesting in that it's quite different from what we know of living or fossil rabbits. Aside from its incredibly large size, its hind legs are rather short, not so good for hopping."

He added, "It's unclear whether their feet would have been decent good luck charms."

Bad luck affected the rabbit when a climate cooling likely ruined comfortable living conditions for the species on its island. The researchers suspect this climate change led to the rabbit's extinction.

Through the recent science, however, it lives on, with more studies of its fossils in the works. Quintana also hopes this rabbit "king" will become a popular mascot for the island.

He explained, "I would like to use N. rex to lure students and visitors to Minorca!"

Dinosaur named 'thunder-thighs'

23 February 2011
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have named a new dinosaur species "thunder-thighs" because of the huge thigh muscles it would have had.

Fossil remains recovered from a quarry in Utah, US, are fragmentary but enough to tell researchers the creature must have possessed extremely powerful legs.

The new species, described in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is a sauropod - the family of dinosaurs famous for their long necks and tails.

It could have given other animals a hefty kick, say its discoverers.

"If predators came after it, it would have been able to boot them out of the way," said Dr Mike Taylor, from University College London, UK.

The team has named its dinosaur Brontomerus mcintoshi - from Greek "bronto", meaning "thunder"; and "merós", meaning "thigh".

The fossilised bones of two specimens - an adult and a juvenile - have been dated to be about 110 million years old.

They were rescued from the Hotel Mesa Quarry in Grand County, Utah.

The site has been looted by commercial fossil-hunters and so scientists have probably been denied the full range of material from which to make their classification.

Nonetheless, those bones they do have sport tell-tale features that mark out an extraordinary species.
Chief among them is a hip-bone, called the ilium, which is unusually large in comparison to that of similar dinosaurs.

The wide, blade-shaped bone projects forward ahead of the hip socket, providing a proportionally massive area for the attachment of muscles.

"As you put the skeleton together, you can run muscles down from the hip-bone to join at the knee and that gives you a whopping thigh," Dr Taylor told BBC News.

"What's interesting is that if it were a sauropod that could move particularly fast, you would expect to see very strong muscles on the back of the leg to pull it along. But we don't; this is the opposite. It seems most likely to us that what this is about is being able to deliver a strong kick," he told BBC News.

The paleo-scientists speculate that the larger specimen in their possession is the mother of the juvenile.

The adult would have weighed about six tonnes - something like the size of a large modern elephant - and probably measured 14m in length.

At a third of the size, the juvenile would have weighed in at about 200kg - the size of a pony - and been 4.5m long.

Brontomerus was living in what geologists term the Early Cretaceous Period.

Some other marks on the fossils give additional clues to what sort of lifestyle the creature had and the environment it faced.

"The shoulder blade of Brontomerus has unusual bumps that probably mark the boundaries of muscle attachments, suggesting that Brontomerus had powerful forelimb muscles as well," explained team-member Dr Matt Wedel, from the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

"It's possible that Brontomerus mcintoshi was more athletic than most other sauropods. It is well established that far from being swamp-bound hippo-like animals, sauropods preferred drier, upland areas; so perhaps Brontomerus lived in rough, hilly terrain and the powerful leg muscles were a sort of 'dinosaur four-wheel drive'."

The team also believes the find is significant for its position in Earth history, in that it challenges the notion that sauropods began to disappear in the Early Cretaceous.

"Because sauropods were the most abundant dinosaurs found during the Jurassic Period and the rarest during the Early Cretaceous, there's long been the perception that sauropods were successful in the Jurassic and were replaced by duckbills and horned dinosaurs in the Cretaceous," said Dr Wedel.

"In the past 20 years, however, we are finding more sauropods from the Early Cretaceous period, and the picture is changing. It now seems that sauropods may have been every bit as diverse as they were during the Jurassic, but much less abundant and so much less likely to be found."

Dr Taylor is disappointed that more of Brontomerus could not be recovered, and wonders whether larger fossil pieces are being held in some unknown private collection.

"The fossil-hunters basically pillaged this site," he told BBC News.

"They left behind broken remnants and smashed bits of bone; and in some cases they were using broken bones to hold down tarpaulins - that's really the most disgraceful aspect of it."

See video and more at:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12542664
(Submitted by Paul Vella)