Above, the fossilized teeth running along the katydid’s left and right wings
that researchers used to reconstruct the creature’s call.

Well-preserved fossils can tell paleontologists myriad things, such as what color feathers dinosaurs had, how ancient spiders evolved, and what kind of microbes were around 3 billion years ago. The latest such revelation is rather whimsical, as well as being scientifically interesting. Scientists have been able to reconstruct the chirping of a Jurassic ancestor of modern katydids by examining the wings of an exquisitely preserved fossil specimen.

Katydids create their song by scraping one wing across the other, running a hard ridge of tiny teeth, like those on a comb, across the ridge on the opposite wing. The research team examined the size and shape of the teeth on the wings of Archaboilus musicus, as the Jurassic specimen is called, to come up with an estimate of the frequency of the sound that such scraping would have produced. They found that the resulting chirping would have fallen at 6.4 kilohertz, within the range of normal human hearing.

So, if you ever get the chance to travel back 165 million years, keep your ears pricked. You might hear something that sounds like this:

Image and video courtesy of Gu et al, PNAS

Tulips in the rocks.

Artist’s conception of what the living creatures would have looked like.

The Burgess Shale fossil beds in the Canadian Rockies are famous for showing us some of the creepiest evolutionary dead-ends to ever grace the planet. They conjure up underwater scenes of many-legged spiky creatures scuttling beneath gigantic spider shrimp, but a recent find in the Burgess Shale suggests a more pastoral landscape: fields of waving tulip-shaped creatures, each about 8 inches high.

These newly discovered filter feeders, named Siphusauctum gregarium by their discoverers, have been found in clumps of over 65, and appear to have fed by sucking water through their bodies and extracting food particles.

Images courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum and Marianne Collins.

[via ScienceDaily]

What’s the News: Researchers have uncovered the youngest known dinosaur bone, dating from shortly before an asteroid slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula around 65 million years ago. The find, published today in Biology Letters, has revived debate among paleontologists over what, exactly, killed the dinosaurs.

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What’s the News: The oldest recovered dinosaurs, including two-legged predators like Herrerasaurus, tromped around Argentina and Brazil some 230 million years ago. But exactly what happened after those beasts is a mystery: paleontologists have puzzled over an evolutionary gap in the fossil record between these early creatures and the more complex theropods, a suborder of bipedal dinosaurs—including Tyrannosaurus rex—that eventually comprised all dino carnivores. In the rocks of New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch, paleontologists have discovered the skull and vertebrae of a new dinosaur species that may fill this evolutionary gap. Dubbed Daemonosaurus chauliodus, this up-to-five-feet long, 205-million-year old predator has characteristics of both the first dinosaurs and the more advanced predators. As Hans-Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told National Geographic, the skull is unusual because “it has a … short snout and these monstrous front teeth. That’s a kind of skull structure for a predatory dinosaur that’s really unexpected for this early point in time.”

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When it come to dinosaurs, names say a lot: “tyrant lizard king” sums up the towering stature and carnivorous ways of Tyrannosaurus rex, and “arm lizard” gestures toward the Brachiosaurus‘s long front legs. And the same is true for the newest discovered dinosaur species, which has been dubbed “thunder-thighs.” That’s because scientists think its muscular thighs were so strong that it used them to boot its enemies.

The official name of this new sauropod species is Brontomerus mcintoshi. The first name is Greek for “thunder-thighs,” and the species name honors the Wesleyan University physics professor and amateur paleontologist Jack McIntosh. This dino is believed to have bigger leg muscles than any other sauropod.

A team of American and British scientists discovered the dinosaur in a quarry in Utah, and published their findings in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Fragments from two skeletons were found: one from an adult (believed to be the mother) and a juvenile. These specimens are roughly 110 million year old, and the larger one would have weighed in at six tons and measured over 45 feet long.

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Titanoceratops—it’s a fittingly majestic name for a monster dinosaur. That’s the moniker paleontologist Nicholas Longrich has bestowed on his new find, and he claims his 74-million-year-old discovery is the common ancestor of the famous Triceratops and its cousin in the triceratopsin family, the Torosaurus.

The species weighed in at around 6,800 kilograms [15,000 pounds] and had an enormous 8-foot skull — rivaling Triceratops for size. It is very similar to Triceratops, but with a thinner frill, longer nose and slightly bigger horns. Titanoceratops lived in the American Southwest during the Cretaceous period, about 74 million years ago, and is the earliest known triceratopsin. [Wired]

Actually, Titanoceratops is not a “new” discovery—but the fossil was mistakenly classified for years, Longrich says. The partial skeleton was turned up in 1941 in New Mexico, and left alone until 1995. At that point scientists dug it up and erected the skeleton in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History as a dinosaur called Pentaceratops sternbergi (in the right side of the image, the shaded parts represent missing pieces that were filled into to model the skull as Pentaceratops). The Pentaceratops lived about 73 to 75 million years ago, but it was much smaller overall than a triceratopsin.

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This fossil of an ancient winged reptile, bought from a farmer in China’s Liaoning province, tells a dramatic tale. About 160 million years ago, a female pterosaur fractured its wing and sank to the bottom of a muddy lake. Somehow, in the process of either dying or decomposing, she expelled a single egg, which has been preserved through the ages.

That’s the story that researchers told in a study published in the journal Science, anyway. And if the remarkably preserved fossil of the reptile Darwinopterus is female, they say, it sheds light on the sex differences and mating rituals of the extinct species. The preserved egg also seems to reveal new details of pterosaur reproduction.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to take to the air, first appearing in the fossil record some 220 million years ago in the late Triassic period. Before their demise 65 million years ago the group evolved to include the largest flying animals ever to live – some had a wingspan of 10 metres. [New Scientist]

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In the ground of Argentina, paleontologists are digging deeper into dinosaur history, back to the point more than 200 million years ago when this group emerged. Now a group says in the journal Science that it has recovered one of the oldest dino fossils ever found: a 230-million-year-old tiny forerunner of the T. rex, called Eodromaeus.

At four feet in length and sporting impressive teeth, the new dino species appears to have been a speedy carnivore—and, possibly, adorable.

“It was very cute; you’d want it as a pet,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s authors. “But it might be best as a guard dinosaur, to keep the dogs away.” [The New York Times]

Sereno’s analysis of Eodromaeus, which lived at the time that present-day Argentina was southwestern Pangea, turned up evidence that he says places it early in the line of the theropods, T. rex‘s group.

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From Ed Yong:

The bones of dinosaurs have told countless tales about their origins and behaviour, but dinosaurs left behind more than just their skeletons. As they walked about, they made tracks, and some of these also fossilised over time. They too are very informative and a new set, made by some of the dinosaurs’ closest relatives, reveals how these ruling reptiles rose to power at a leisurely pace.

Dinosaurs evolved during the Triassic period from among a broader group called the dinosauromorphs. These include all dinosaurs as well as their closest relatives, species like Lagerpeton and Lagosuchus that only just miss out on membership in the dinosaur club. Fossils of these latter animals are extremely rare and only ten or so species are well documented. Their tracks, on the other hand, are more common.

…

Indeed [their footprints] suggest that the dinosauromorphs evolved in a geological heartbeat after the greatest mass extinction of all time, a cataclysmic event “when life nearly died”.

For more about the footprints, and how they might push back the date of these dinosauromorphs back to 250 million years ago, check out the rest of the post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Not Exactly Rocket Science: Walking with dinosaur ancestors – footprints put dinosaur-like beasts at scene of life’s great comeback
80beats: How Tyrannosaurs Grew from Tiny “Jackals” to Ferocious Giants
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Image: American Museum of Natural History

Earlier this month DISCOVER covered the 213-million-year-old fossils of the theropod Tawa hallae, a dinosaur ancestor that could show how early dinos spread around the world. Now, in a study (in press) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, another research team has uncovered a surprise in the bones of a theropod from almost 100 million years later. By that time, these creatures may have adopted a clever new weapon: venom.

Sinornithosaurus lived 125 million years ago in what’s now China, and while it might have been covered in feathers (and the size of a turkey), the researchers say it attacked like modern rear-fanged snakes. Rear-fanged snakes don’t inject venom. Instead, the toxin flows down a telltale groove in a fang’s surface and into the bite wound, inducing a state of shock [National Geographic].

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Sixty-five million years ago—we know when the dinosaur story ends. But the beginning of the dinosaur age is hazier, due to the small number of distinct fossils with which to set a time frame. But now scientists have turned up fossils in New Mexico of an early dinosaur ancestor, they report tomorrow in the journal Science, one that points to South America as the possible place of dinosaur origin.

The feathered beast, named Tawa hallae, was the size of a large dog and sported a long neck and tail, a slender snout, and sharp, curved teeth to catch and kill its prey [The Guardian]. Tawa hallae is an early theropod, meaning it is related to birds and the mighty T. Rex.

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Paleontologists believe that majestic pterosaurs ruled the skies during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, soaring overhead on their leathery wings while dinosaurs stomped over the ground below. But researchers recently began wondering how exactly those “winged lizards” lifted off, as some of them weighed more than 500 pounds and were as tall as a giraffe. Last year, researchers tried to figure out how they got off the ground by looking at the largest bird now flying, the albatross. They concluded that anything much bigger couldn’t get off the ground the same way [AP], because the wing muscles wouldn’t be able to generate enough lift. But researcher Mike Habib now says pterosaurs shouldn’t be compared to birds. “The catch is that they are not built like birds,” Habib said [AP].

Habib thinks he has the answer to the pterosaurs’ launching maneuver. When the pterosaurs’ strong wings were folded they created “knuckles” that the animals rested on in four-legged stance, he says, which allowed them to take off in a motion akin to leap-frogging. The back legs kicked off first, Habib says, and then the front legs gave a mighty push to propel them into the air. This procedure would negate the need for launching aids that other paleontologists have suggested, like strong winds, a downslope, or a cliff to jump from. “Using all four legs, it takes less than a second to get off of flat ground, no wind, no cliffs,” Habib said. “This was a good thing to be able to do if you lived in the late Cretaceous period and there were hungry tyrannosaurs wandering around” [LiveScience].

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