Latest news with #paleontology
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Gray Fossil Site celebrates 25-year anniversary
GRAY, Tenn. (WJHL) – What started as a small discovery in 2000 is now a popular attraction in the Tri-Cities. 25 years after that discovery, the Gray Fossil Site continues to evolve, with new discoveries every day. On Saturday, the Fossil Site kicked off its 25th anniversary celebration, a milestone many couldn't believe had already arrived. 'Most people are like, 'No way, I can't believe it's been 25 years since that time,'' said Executive Director Blaine Shubert. 'But to really update the public on all of the amazing discoveries that we've actually had and also showcase some of the new exhibits we've developed, too.' Throughout the event, ETSU Paleontology students, fossil site employees and volunteers presented their research to the public. Schubert said with the recent addition of the Hands On! Discovery Center, the site has evolved into a place of learning for all. 'So you have these two entities in one place and an academic program to where the students are getting to be involved in not only things like excavation, but building exhibits, doing outreach programs here at the museum,' he said. 'And so we just continue to grow and diversify.' Recent ETSU graduate and Collections Assistant Derek Den Ouden said he's thankful to have been a part of the site's 25-year history. 'It's been really fantastic and awesome to be a part of the broader gray fossil site experience and contribute my name to the legacy that we've established over the past 25 years,' he said. Now that the site has reached the 25-year milestone, Den Ouden said he's excited to see what the next 25 years will bring. 'We're always digging and there's always some surprise,' he said. 'So I'm really hopeful that we'll find some really exceptional stuff in the next 25 years.' Schubert said Saturday's event is the kick-off for a year-long celebration. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CTV News
2 days ago
- General
- CTV News
New fossil find rewrites ancient history
Winnipeg Watch Dr. Joe Moysiuk introduces Mosura fentoni, a 500-million-year-old fossil that could shift how we understand early evolution.
CTV News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Grande Prairie area dinosaur featured in upcoming Walking with Dinosaurs television series
Emily Bamforth applies plaster to the pachyrhinosaurus lakusta skull to prepare it for its move in the Pipestone Creek bone bed about 40 km west of Grande Prairie, Alta. on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. (Photo by Jesse Boily) After almost 25 years a show that brought dinosaurs to life on our television screens is returning, with a local dinosaur taking the spotlight. BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs will feature Wembley's own Pipestone Creek bonebed and its locally unique dinosaur, the pachyrhinosaurus. 'I really loved the original Walking with Dinosaurs, because it was the first time that they had brought dinosaurs to life in a way that presented them as animals,' said Emily Bamforth, Philip J. Currie Museum (PJCDM) curator. She said although dinosaurs were seen on the big screen in movies like Jurassic Park they were depicted as monsters. 'Walking with Dinosaurs was really like a nature documentary about dinosaurs, and no one had ever done that before, so it was hugely influential for me as a kid, and I think it was one of the milestones in terms of the things that influenced me, in terms of the wanting to go into paleontology.' Bamforth is now part of the series as she will help tell the more than 70-million-year-old story of the pachyrhinosaurus and the river of death. 'We tell a story about the bonebed and the herd of animals and the dying from a flood and then getting preserved, but to actually have that brought to life is kind of jaw-dropping,' said Bamforth. She hasn't yet seen the final episode, but an early draft left her with 'tingles' due to how real it felt. 'These aren't just dusty old bones sitting in the ground, these were animals living in this ecosystem,' she said. 'All of this happened right here in northern Alberta, this was our world back then.' A young pachyrhinosaurus named Albie will be featured in the fifth episode of the new series. 'Every year, his herd makes an epic journey north as the seasons change,' says a BBC press release. 'Along the way, he will encounter clashing bulls, tyrannosaur predators, and freak weather events.' According to the BBC, the visual effects teams built up the skeleton, musculature, and finally, the skin in a process that took about 2.5 years. Bamforth says the BBC initially contacted her in 2023 when the show was scouting for various sites worldwide to feature. 'All of the sites in the world, and all the big museums doing big research, they chose us as one of six sites in the world featured for this series, so it really is an incredible honour,' she said. Bamforth and the paleontologist team at PJCDM have been busy: Just last year they made the most significant find to date: a 1.6 metre-long, 461-kilogram skull. It made international headlines and now the museum is once again in the global spotlight thanks to the BBC. 'I think it's bigger than we sort of expected it to be,' said Bamforth, who said she's done over 11 media interviews in the past week from outlets in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. 'It is a very special site; it's like no other in the world, like no place I've ever worked has been like this.' The Pipestone Creek bonebed is one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America. 'I think the community of Grande Prairie and the surrounding communities should be really proud of the fact that this is here and that we have the PJCDM that is helping tell that story, and now we have people from around the world that are interested in coming here,' said Bamforth. 'This is something that's ours, and we can really showcase the amazing paleontology that we have up here, which hasn't really been well appreciated in the past.' She hopes it will bring more international and local visitors to the site to discover what it offers. Walking with Dinosaurs premiered in the UK on May 25 and will premiere on PBS in Canada on June 16. By Jesse Boily, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Town & Country News
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
CNN
4 days ago
- General
- CNN
What megalodon really ate to meet its 100,000-calorie daily requirement, according to a new study
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — What scientists understand about the voracious feeding habits of the colossal megalodon could be up for some revision. The prehistoric predator that went extinct about 3.6 million years ago was not hunting only large marine mammals such as whales as researchers widely thought, a new study has found. Instead, minerals in fossilized teeth reveal that megalodon might have been an opportunistic feeder to meet its remarkable 100,000-calorie-per-day requirement. 'When available, it would probably have fed on large prey items, but when not available, it was flexible enough to feed also on smaller animals to fulfill its dietary requirements,' said lead study author Jeremy McCormack, a geoscientist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The study, published Monday in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, also showed there were regional differences in the giant shark's feeding habits. The finding suggests megalodon would pursue whatever was in local waters, devouring other top predators and smaller prey alike. 'They were not concentrating on certain prey types, but they must have fed throughout the food web, on many different species,' McCormack said. 'While certainly this was a fierce apex predator, and no one else would probably prey on an adult megalodon, it's clear that they themselves could potentially feed on almost everything else that swam around.' Megalodon dispatched its prey with a ferocious bite and lethal, serrated teeth that could reach up to 7 inches (18 centimeters) long — the size of a human hand. The superpredator's teeth — abundant in the fossil record — are what McCormack and his colleagues used to conduct a geochemical analysis, unlocking fresh clues that could challenge megalodon's role as sole king of the ancient seas. Zinc in megalodon teeth It's not the first time that a study has challenged previous knowledge about the enormous sea creature. In fact, many questions remain unanswered about Otodus megalodon — its scientific species name meaning 'giant tooth' — since no complete fossil has ever been discovered. The lack of hard evidence stems from the fact that fish skeletons are made of softer cartilage rather than bone, so they don't fossilize very well. Recent research found that the animal was more warm-blooded than other sharks, for example, and there is an ongoing debate about its size and shape. Scientists who created a 3D reconstruction suggest ed in 2022 that megalodon was about three times as long as a great white shark — about 52 feet (16 meters). However, a March study hypothesized that the megashark was actually much larger — up to 80 feet (24 meters) in length and even longer than the fictional version in the 2018 blockbuster 'The Meg,' which suggested the ancient predator was 75 feet (23 meters) from head to tail. As for megalodon's feeding habits, determining what it ate based on fossil evidence poses challenges, according to McCormack. 'We know that they fed on large marine mammals from tooth bite marks,' he said. 'Of course, you can see bite marks on the bones of marine mammals, but you will not see them if they fed on other sharks, because sharks don't have bones. So there's already a bias in this kind of fossil record.' To glean more about megalodon's prey selection, McCormack and his coauthors looked at the giant shark's fossilized teeth and compared them with those of other animals that lived at the same time, as well as teeth from modern sharks and other predators such as dolphins. The researchers used specimens from museum collections and samples from beached animal carcasses. Specifically, the study team conducted a lab analysis of zinc, a mineral that is acquired only through food. Zinc is essential for living organisms and plays a crucial role in tooth development. The ratio of heavy and light zinc isotopes in the sharks' tooth enamel preserves a record of the kind of animal matter that they ate. Different types, or isotopes, of zinc are absorbed when fish and other animals eat, but one of them — zinc-66 — is stored in tooth enamel much less than another, zinc-64. The ratio between those zinc isotopes widens the further away an animal gets from the lowest level of the food chain. That means that a fish eating other fish would have lower levels of zinc-66 compared with zinc-64, and the fish that eat those fish will have even less zinc-66 compared with zinc-64, creating ratio markers that can help draw up a sequence of the food chain. The researchers found that sea bream, a fish that feeds on mussels and crustaceans, was at the bottom of their reconstructed chain, followed by smaller sharks from the Carcharhinus genus, up to 9.8 feet (3 meters) in length, and extinct toothed whales comparable in size to modern dolphins. Farther up were larger sharks such as the Galeocerdo aduncus, similar to a modern tiger shark, and occupying the top slot was megalodon — but its zinc ratios were not so different as to suggest a massive gap with the lower-tier animals, meaning they might have been part of megalodon's diet, too. 'Based on our new results, we see that it was clear it could feed at the very top, but it was flexible enough to feed also on lower (levels of the food chain),' McCormack said. In addition, the researchers found megalodon was not alone at the top of the food chain but instead shared the spot with other 'opportunistic supercarnivores' such as its close relative Otodus chubutensis and the lesser-known Araloselachus cuspidatus, another giant fish-eating shark. That revelation challenges the assumption that megalodon was the exclusive ruler of the oceans and draws comparisons with the great white shark, another large opportunistic feeder. The finding also reinforces the idea that the rise of the great white may have been a factor in megalodon's extinction, according to paleobiologist Kenshu Shimada, one of the coauthors of the latest study. 'One of the contributing factors for the demise of megalodon has been hypothesized to be the rise of the great white shark, which feeds on fish when young and shifts its diet to marine mammals as it becomes larger,' said Shimada, a professor of biological and environmental sciences at DePaul University in Chicago. 'Our new study, that demonstrates the 'diet overlap' between the great white shark and megalodon, strengthens the idea that the evolution of the smaller, likely more agile and maneuverable great white shark could have indeed (driven) megalodon to extinction.' Megalodon vs. great white shark The new research allows scientists to recreate a snapshot of the marine food web that existed about 20 million years ago, according to Jack Cooper, a UK-based paleobiologist and megalodon expert who wasn't involved with the study. 'The general picture of megalodon has been of a gigantic shark munching on whales,' Cooper said in an email. 'This study adds a new dimension that megalodon probably had a wide range of prey — essentially, it probably ate not just whales but whatever it wanted.' Another interesting find, he added, is that megalodon's diet probably varied slightly between different populations, something observed in today's great white sharks. 'This makes sense and is something we would have probably expected since megalodon lived all over the world and not all of its prey items would have done; but it's wonderful to have concrete data supporting this hypothesis,' Cooper said. The study adds to a growing body of evidence that is reshaping commonly held beliefs about megalodon and its close relatives, said Alberto Collareta, a researcher in the department of Earth sciences at Italy's University of Pisa who was not involved in the research. 'These have led us to abandon traditional reconstruction of the megatooth sharks as 'inflated' versions of the modern white shark. We now know that the Megalodon was something else — in terms of size, shape and ancestry, and of biology, too,' Collareta said via email. 'The Miocene (palaeo)ecosystems in question did not work in a radically different way compared to their modern counterparts — even if they feature … completely extinct protagonists such as the megatooth sharks,' he added, highlighting what he found to be the report's key takeaway. 'That said, it is still useful to acknowledge that our understanding of the Meg is essentially limited to its ubiquitous teeth, a few vertebrae and a handful of scales. What I'd really love to see emerging from 'the foggy ruins of time' is a complete Meg skeleton… Let's hope that the fossil record will amaze us once again.'
