Junebug
Well-known member
Hey, no smoking around here. You might burn the straw man.
One of the best examples of soft-tissue impressions in a fossil dinosaur was discovered in Pietraroia, Italy. The discovery was reported in 1998, and described the specimen of a small, very young coelurosaur, Scipionyx samniticus. The fossil includes portions of the intestines, colon, liver, muscles, and windpipe of this immature dinosaur.[51]
In the March 2005 issue of Science, the paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer and her team announced the discovery of flexible material resembling actual soft tissue inside a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. After recovery, the tissue was rehydrated by the science team.[52]
When the fossilized bone was treated over several weeks to remove mineral content from the fossilized bone-marrow cavity (a process called demineralization), Schweitzer found evidence of intact structures such as blood vessels, bone matrix, and connective tissue (bone fibers). Scrutiny under the microscope further revealed that the putative dinosaur soft tissue had retained fine structures (microstructures) even at the cellular level. The exact nature and composition of this material, and the implications of Schweitzer's discovery, are not yet clear; study and interpretation of the material is ongoing.[52]
In 2009, a team including Schweitzer announced that, using even more careful methodology, they had duplicated their results by finding similar soft tissue in a duck-billed dinosaur, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, found in the Judith River Formation of Montana. This included even more detailed tissue, down to preserved bone cells that seem even to have visible remnants of nuclei and what seem to be red blood cells. Among other materials found in the bone was collagen, as in the Tyrannosaurus bone mentioned above. The type of collagen an animal has in its bones varies according to its DNA and, in both cases, this collagen was of the same type found in modern chickens and ostriches.[176]
The successful extraction of ancient DNA from dinosaur fossils has been reported on two separate occasions; upon further inspection and peer review, however, neither of these reports could be confirmed.[177] However, a functional peptide involved in the vision of a theoretical dinosaur has been inferred using analytical phylogenetic reconstruction methods on gene sequences of related modern species such as reptiles and birds.[178] In addition, several proteins, including hemoglobin,[179] have putatively been detected in dinosaur fossils.
Jurassic Park is only a matter of time. We just need Buckets to fund it.
That Earth, for much of its history, has been covered by water isn’t much of surprise. But how so much water ended up on a planet that, at its birth, was boiling hot has puzzled scientists for decades. Previous theories had assumed that Earth had picked up its water when it collided violently with icy comets and asteroids. But an alternate hypothesis just received a boost courtesy of a new study published in Science: Earth’s water may have been here all along, oozing out gradually from as rock deep in the crust was pressed by the intense heat and pressure below the surface.
Steven Jacobsen, the Northwestern University professor who led the study, found water in subterranean ringwoodite, a deep blue mineral chemically similar to peridot, a green mineral often used in jewelry. Until a sample turned up in 2008 in a diamond coughed up from a volcano, ringwoodite had only been found in meteorites. The ringwoodite came from the “transition zone” between the upper and lower mantle, about 400 miles below the Earth’s surface, and about 1.5% of its weight turned out to be water. If a lot of this water-heavy mineral existed underground, scientists reasoned, that might be enough to explain where Earth’s oceans came from.
If all the ringwoodite in the transition zone is as damp as the samples that Jacobsen and his team detected, that layer would hold three times as much water as all of the Earth’s oceans combined, reducing their share from 96.5% of all known water to a relatively paltry 24.8%. In other words, the ringwoodite discovery could quadruple the amount of water found on Earth. A blue planet, indeed.
WFU Anthropologist finds new fossils and named it after Mick Jagger.
http://www.journalnow.com/news/loca...cle_9178aed1-8da8-576b-90e2-5682d313fa74.html
Native North American earthworms, such as Megascolecidae, will have naturally spread north through the United States Upper Midwest to the Canadian border, recovering from the Laurentide ice sheet glaciation (38°N to 49°N), assuming a migration rate of 10 m / year. (However, non-native invasive earthworms of North America have already been introduced by humans on a much shorter timescale, causing a shock to the regional ecosystem.)
The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop. Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall. By this time, they will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of present-day species) will die.
Carbon dioxide levels fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible. Free oxygen and ozone disappear from the atmosphere. Multicellular life dies out.
The Sun's luminosity has increased by 10 percent, causing Earth's surface temperatures to reach an average of ~320 K (47 °C, 116 °F). The atmosphere will become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. Pockets of water may still be present at the poles, allowing abodes for simple life.[42][43]
Eukaryotic life dies out due to carbon dioxide starvation. Only prokaryotes remain.
The Earth's outer core freezes, if the inner core continues to grow at its current rate of 1 mm per year. Without its liquid outer core, the Earth's magnetic field shuts down, and charged particles emanating from the Sun gradually deplete the atmosphere.
2,300,000,000 years from now