Latest news with #dinosaurs
Geek Tyrant
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Behind-The-Scenes Featurette For JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH Focuses on Bringing Dinosaurs To Life — GeekTyrant
Universal Pictures has shared a new behind-the-scenes featurette for Jurassic World Rebirth , and it puts a focus on bringing the dinosaurs to life for the movie. The video offers interviews with Gareth Edwards, the cast and his VFX team discussing the making of this movie, footage from the production, and some new footage from the movie, which looks like a really fun ride! This script for the movie is written by original Jurassic Park Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, and that is what excites me most about the movie! In the film, 'The planet's ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. 'The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.' The movie stars Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis, and Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid. The director previously said that the movie is 'a giant love letter to Steven Spielberg and his earlier films. There are moments in this movie that remind me very much of Jaws. 'It's like little greatest hits of all those aspects of his films that I loved growing up as a child. It's essentially a little adventure odyssey across this island, a survival story, really.' The film is set five years after the events of Dominion , 'in which dinosaurs mingled with humans all over the globe, these creatures are now dying out. 'The present-day planet proved to be inhospitable to the prehistoric ilk, except for a small region in the tropics around the equator, where many of them now congregate. 'The three most colossal dinosaurs of land, sea, and air within this biosphere hold genetic material precious to a pharmaceutical company that hopes to use the dino DNA to create a life-saving drug for humanity.' Universal Pictures will release the Steven Spielberg-produced film in theaters on July 2, 2025.
BBC News
3 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Dinosaurs could help with future cancer treatments scientists say
Dinosaurs could be important in helping scientists find new cancer discoveries in the future, experts were able to find important structures in an ancient dino fossil, which hadn't been seen new study also suggests that the prehistoric creatures could also play a role in future treatments for because dinosaurs could help specialists better understand what the disease looked like tens of millions of years ago. What did scientists discover? The eight year study involved researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Imperial College, took a closer look at fossils of a Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, a duck-billed, plant eating "marsh lizard". In 2016, scientists discovered this dinosaur had a benign tumour in its jaw called an ameloblastoma, which humans can also team put the fossil under a microscope and were surprised by what they Biancastella Cereser, from Imperial explained: "What we saw inside - there were some structures, some forms, that looked like blood cells."The team said that they also found that soft tissue and cells are more commonly preserved in ancient remains than previously could help scientists better understand the diseases that affected prehistoric creatures, including cancer, which could potentially influence how the disease is treated in humans in the Justin Stebbing from ARU, who was also involved with the study, added: "If we can understand cancer better, we can come up with better treatments."
CTV News
4 days ago
- General
- CTV News
Chubby cheeks? How a local paleontology student discovered a new muscle in dino jaws
Research by University of Alberta student Henry Sharpe shows dinosaurs may have had chubby cheek muscles. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has the details. Research by University of Alberta student Henry Sharpe shows dinosaurs may have had chubby cheek muscles. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has the details. Dinosaurs may have had chubby cheeks instead of horns, new research shows Our understanding of how dinosaurs looked and lived is evolving thanks to a recent discovery by a University of Alberta grad student. Paleontology master's student Henry Sharpe has found a new jaw muscle that could help complete the picture of how dinosaurs dined. Sharpe said he was working on his undergrad when something jumped out at him while studying a duck-billed dinosaur from Drumheller named Gary. 'I was looking at the cheekbone,' Sharpe said. 'And I was just thinking, 'This doesn't look right. There's this big kind of triangle coming down from it. There shouldn't be anything there.' 'It almost looks like a muscle attachment.' Henry Sharpe dinosaur muscle Henry Sharpe points to a triangular structure on a dinosaur skull. This particular shape led him to the discovery of a new jaw muscle many dinosaurs appear to have had. (Jeremy Thompson/CTV News Edmonton) Sharpe explained that, normally, in an animal without a cheek muscle, there is a straight line from the jawbone to the back of the skull. Gary's skull, with a flange on the jaw, got him thinking. But, because whole dino heads are rare, he had to scale down to start investigating. 'Thankfully, most of what we find are isolated bones,' Sharpe said. 'So I just took isolated cheek bones and isolated jaw bones … cutting them open to see if I could find any evidence in the internal structure of the bone.' Muscles and tendons are soft tissue, meaning they would have been long gone a long, long time ago. However, Sharpe said, they leave enough of a mark to see millions of years later in large animals like dinosaurs. 'Connective tissues, like muscles and ligaments, will insert fibres, collagen fibres, into the bone itself,' he said. 'When the muscle degrades and all that stuff falls away … the fibres will still be in the bone.' Dinosaur bone muscle Connective tissue, like muscles, leave fibres inside bone that can be seen millions of years later under a microscope. (Jeremy Thompson/CTV News Edmonton) Sharpe said the more he looked at similarly shaped jaw bones, the more he found the fibre marks. When he shared his research with other paleontologists, they started finding the same thing. 'We brought all our findings together, we mapped it out in the dinosaur family tree, and we just found it was the same everywhere,' he added. 'It was a bit of a 'eureka' moment.' The discovery, Sharpe said, helps better understand how dinosaurs ate and calls into question the long-standing practice of modeling dino musculature after their closest living relatives. 'It's supposed to be you only reconstruct a muscle in dinosaurs if it's present in birds and present in crocodiles,' Sharpe said. 'We've provided an example of the traditional way of doing it, maybe not being so accurate, and we need to be a little bit more creative in how we go about reconstructing these things, because it has implications for not only what they looked like, but how they were going about chewing.' Dinosaur cheek muscle This rendering by University of Alberta paleontology student Henry Sharpe shows a previously undiscovered jaw muscle detailed in new research. (Supplied) Sharpe and his peers had their findings published in a scientific journal. While it's a big breakthrough, the cheek muscle is more a passion project for Sharpe as he works on his master's thesis on underwater reptiles. He hopes the research inspires more paleontologists to follow up on the findings – and perhaps consider there could be other similar discoveries ready to be found in dino remains. 'We want to make sure we're not missing anything because we're trying to be too restrictive with how we reconstruct (musculature and ligaments),' he said. 'We have to be more creative. 'We have to start looking at the bones first, and our modern relatives maybe second, because it's the bones that tell us the stories.' With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson
The Independent
5 days ago
- Science
- The Independent
Secrets of ‘polar dinosaur' forest home revealed for first time in 120 million years
Roughly 140 million to 100 million years ago, the piece of land that is modern day Australia was located much further south on Earth. In fact, what is now Victoria was once within the polar circle, up to 80 degrees south of the equator and shrouded in darkness for months at a time. Despite these harsh conditions, dinosaurs thrived here, leaving behind evidence of their existence at various palaeontological sites. For decades, scientists have come to these sites to study the rocks containing the bones of these ancient creatures in order to better understand them. My new research with palynologist Barbara Wagstaff, published in Alcheringa, builds on existing knowledge by using plant fossils from bone-bearing sites in the region to explain how the forests these dinosaurs lived in evolved – and, for the first time, illustrating them in detail. One of the warmest periods on Earth The Early Cretaceous epoch – between roughly 140 million and 100 million years ago – represents one of the warmest periods in the last half a billion years of Earth's history. The sustained warmth was a result of increased volcanic activity, which released large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The sustained warmth resulted in no polar ice caps, high sea levels and flooded continents. The geographic distribution of land masses was also very different back then. The supercontinent Gondwana, in which most of the southern continents we know today were clumped into a single landmass, had only just started to break apart. At the time, southernmost Australia was in the polar circle. The dinosaurs that lived in this region are known as 'polar dinosaurs'. They included small ornithopods (plant-eaters with beaks and cheeks full of teeth) and therapods (carnivorous and predatory dinosaurs). Building a picture of ancient plants For decades, palaeontologists have been studying rocks from Victorian sites. To establish the age of the recovered dinosaur bones, we've needed the expertise of palynologists – palaeontologists who study microscopic fossil spores and pollen produced by plants. Palynologists identified key species that they dissolved out of rocks. They deduced the dinosaur bones ranged in age from 130 to 100 million years old. At the same time, they were carefully recording all the microscopic spores and pollen they saw in the slides to build a picture of the plants through the Early Cretaceous period. A planet-altering transition The transition from a world without flowers to one with flowers has fascinated scientists for centuries, most famously Charles Darwin who labelled them 'an abominable mystery'. More importantly, it also forever changed our planet. Shortly after their first appearance, approximately 132 million years ago, albeit in the southern portion of the supercontinent Laurasia, we see an explosive radiation of flowering plants not only in our new record from Victoria, but also globally. What fuelled the evolution and rapid global expansion of flowering plants that dominate the Australian landscape today? Our new research suggests warmer conditions helped flowering plants migrate across the globe and colonise understorey habitats shortly after evolving. Increased competition also contributed to the turnover in understorey flora, with flowering plants outcompeting lycophytes in rapidly colonising braided river channels after flooding events. The appearance of flowering plants in the landscape resulted in the extinction of numerous understorey plants (in particular ferns) with a long fossil record. As a result, by 100 million years ago, the forests of Victoria included an open conifer-dominated forest canopy. The subcanopy beneath was made up of seed ferns and ferns. Flowering plants and ferns featured in the understorey, alongside liverworts, hornworts, lycophytes and sphagnum-like mosses. Diversifying in a warming world High carbon dioxide levels in the past made the planet warmer. This is consistent with what's happening today. As a result of these warmer conditions, cool-temperate forests thrived in the polar circle. For flowering plants, the warmer conditions provided an opportunity to diversify in an increasingly warm world. However, not all plants adapted to the warming world, with many understorey floras, including ferns, becoming extinct. The fossil record provides crucial insights into how life will respond to predicted future climate conditions because these have occurred before in Earth's history. Knowing this history is crucial to our response to the current climate change challenge. Some exciting places to visit to see fossils in Australia include Eric the Red West dig site in the Otway Ranges, Inverloch's Dinosaur Dreaming dig site in Victoria, the Dinosaur Trail along the Queensland towns of Hughenden, Richmond and Winton, and sauropod footprints in Western Australia at Gantheaume Point.
Geek Culture
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Culture
Jurassic World: The Experience Brings Prehistoric Thrills To Singapore From 29 May
Before the world of dinosaurs and apex predators roars back to life on the big screen with Jurassic World: Rebirth , Singapore will first revisit the franchise's legacy in style. Jurassic World: The Experience is set to turn back the clock starting 29 May, transforming Gardens by the Bay into a prehistoric landscape. Held at Cloud Forest, it leans into the buzz once doors open, leading visitors through a short passageway adorned with themed decor, including a giant eye peeking out of foliage. Then comes the distinctive logo that fans have come to know and love, with two Brachiosaurus – each towering at 8.5 metres – standing in front of the waterfall. Moving on from Brachiosaurus Falls to Where It All Began reveals tiny Compsognathus on display, accompanied by iconic audio excerpts from the films, alongside a chance to get up close and personal with dinosaur babies on the side. Operating on the concept of a petting zoo, the interactive session invites the public to lay their hands on them, while the Aviary exhibit features a pair of Velociraptors fixing their gaze on Pterandon nests in the distance. A protective Pteranodon hovers above, joining its other counterparts in the skies. Hot on its heels is Tyrannosarurus Breakout, one of the biggest highlights of the event. A ferocious, animatronic T-Rex serves as the centrepiece, letting out a loud roar as it breaks through a shattered fence designed to mirror the set design used for filming. The apex predator isn't the only sign of life here: cycads, ancient plants that grew across the land during the dinosaur era, can be found amid the action, with their roots tracing all the way back to over 280 million years ago. In fact, Evolution Walk is where the undergrowth gets to shine. Apart from chronicling its over-time growth from freshwater algae to the various species now inhabiting the earth, the education trail also showcases 3D recreations of long-extinct plants. At the end of the road lies Stiggy Truck, where a Stygiomoloch emerges from a cargo box after a few seconds of violent shaking. The next encounter thrusts the Brachiosaurus back into the spotlight again – this time, surrounded by staggeringly tall ancient conifers as it sways its long neck gently. But the true fun begins at the Dilophosaurus Ambush, where the carnivorous dinosaurs lie in ambush amongst toppled crates and open cages, bearing their frills and hissing away just like in the first Jurassic Park film. It leads into Muzzle Raptors, featuring the pack of sisters Echo, Delta, and Charlie, who evoke a lifelike quality with their displays of micro-expressions, such as blinking eyes and jaws locked in a grimace. An interesting note about the zone is how it inherits the same setup that riders encounter while queuing for Jurassic World VelociCoaster in Universal Studios Orlando, which makes for a neat attention to detail. Saving the best for the last, Blue, the leading raptor of the Jurassic World movies, is at the front and centre of The Final Roar. Here, visitors can catch the intelligent dinosaur in the flesh, complete with a dramatic entrance, jaw-snapping sound effects and an opportunity to get even closer to the setpiece. As Jurassic World: The Experience comes to a close, remember to snap a few shots against different animated backdrops at the Jurassic World Gate, or soak in a contemplative arrangement inspired by iconic soundtracks across the franchise at the Prehistoric Grove. The adventure officially ends at the retail store, where exclusive Jurassic World merchandise like plushies, t-shirts, pins and magnets designed in the style of warning signs, luggage tags, and more, await. Jurassic World: The Experience will be open from 9am to 9pm starting 29 May at Cloud Forest. Tickets are priced at S$22 for Singapore Residents belonging to the children (3-12 years old) or seniors (60 and above) category, and S$26 for adults, with purchase available on Garden by the Bay's website. Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth's theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia's greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
