“These new tracks
are just one centimetre in length, which means the dinosaur that made
them was an animal you could have easily held in your hand.They are the world’s smallest dinosaur tracks.”
“Dug out from the permafrost in Siberia’s Batagaika crater – AKA the “Doorway to the Underworld” – the tiny colt is so beautifully preserved, it looks like it could be sleeping. But the equine died a long time ago – between 30,000 and 40,000 years, during the Upper Palaeolithic.
Discovered by local residents, the foal was excavated by scientists from Japan and Russia, and taken to the Mammoth Museum at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk.
“This is the first find in the world of a prehistoric horse of such a young age and with such an amazing level of preservation,” said the museum’s laboratory head, Semyon Grigoryev.
The foal was aged just 2 to 3 months when it died, just 98 centimetres (38 inches) at its shoulder, and its dark brown coat, mane, tail and hooves are all intact. Even its internal organs were preserved by the permafrost, a layer of the ground that is permanently below freezing temperature.
The species, the researchers said, is genetically distinct from those now living in the Yakutia region. It was an Equus lenensis (also known as the Lena horse), which roamed the region in the late Pleistocene, now extinct and known from mummified remains found in the permafrost.”
Birds of prey didn’t evolve from dromaeosaurs – in fact, the definition of dromaeosauridae is “everything closer to Deinonychus than to Troodon or Passer”. Passer is the house sparrow, and since multiple lines of evidence indicate that modern birds only evolved once, this very much excludes modern raptors.
Modern raptors are related to Velociraptor – but then, so are modern chickens, and parrots, and hummingbirds. Actually, all modern birds are equally closely related to dromaeosaurs! Rather than grandparents of today’s birds, dromaeosaurs were more like cousins – not directly ancestral, but a related line of the family. If you think of modern birds as siblings in this analogy, it’s pretty easy to understand that no sibling is more closely related to the cousins.
Different Asilisaurus that had grown at the same place and time did not develop into maturity the same way, instead going through their maturity at different rates.
Tanystropheus, infamous in the fossil record as a sea dweller that almost defied the laws of physics and biology.
With a neck up 3 metres long, (that’s twice the size of an average man) containing only 10 highly elongated vertebrae, Tanystropheus remains one of the most bizarre animals to inhabit the Earth. This neck was also longer than Tanystropheus’ body and tail combined. To put it into perspective, the neck took up almost 75% of the whole body length.
To hold a neck so large off of the ground would have put huge strain on the shoulders and back, for this reason Tanystropheus is believed to have spent most of its time in the water. However the position of the legs and hips suggests that the animal could support itself on land, leading to many palaeontologists suggesting Tanystropheus was adapted to ambush hunting with its body on land and its head submerged in the water. Recent research of fossilised impressions Tanystropheus indicate the rear of the animal had greatly developed muscles shifting its centre of weight further from its neck, improving the balance of a somewhat clumsy looking animal.
Despite spending most of its time in the water, Tanystropheus wasn’t a strong swimmer, its feet were not webbed, and the neck was surprisingly stiff, as it consisted of only around 10 cervical vertebrae, movement was restricted to side to side motion. Tanystropheus made a name for itself when it was discovered in the mid 1800’s, engineers estimated that this strange animal had the longest neck physically possible of on organism with relation to its body size. Oddly enough, Tanystropheus is a distant triassic relative to pterosaurs, dinosaurs and the modern crocodiles, yet they themselves went extinct around 205 million years ago.
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