Dinosaurs didn’t have a chance: When it came to asteroids, they had a one-two punch.
They went extinct 65 million years ago by at least 2 meteorite impacts. Scientists had identified know where the crater left by the first one is: on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Now they think they’ve found evidence of the second one in the Ukraine, in the form of the Boltysh Crater.. In fact, those giant lizards may have been pelted by a SHOWER of meteorites!
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Researchers used to think that male dinosaurs couldn’t get enough sex, but now they think they had harems of females!
They base this conclusion on studies of emus, which are their closest relatives, which are polygamous, but are also devoted dads. Paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson noticed that the ancient dinosaur nests he found suggested that “multiple females contributed the eggs and the male guarded them.” So a dinosaur Dad may have had lots of “wives,” but that didn’t mean he had it easy!
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
Does what happened in the past tell us what will happen in the future? Only if we have the right interpreter!
A team of researchers claim that they can create a mammoth from ancient DNA for $10 million and sell them to zoos around the world. The price seems high, but it’s around the same amount that museums have recently paid for dinosaur fossils.
They were able to get the DNA from hair taken from deep-frozen woolly mammoth carcasses. Though some parts of the DNA are missing, they have about 80% of it.
Hair is one of the best body parts to extract DNA from, since bone often contains fungi and bacteria. In BBC News, Paul Rincon quotes researcher Jeremy Austin as saying, “It’s a bit like trying to build a car with only 80% of the parts and knowing that some of the parts are already broken.”
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An asteroid may have dealt the final blow to the dinosaurs, but that was because they were in a weakened state, since they were already being nibbled to death by insects!
In the January 7th edition of the Independent, John von Radowitz writes that “Disease spread by ancient mosquitoes, mites and ticks was probably the major factor that finished off the extinct reptiles.” Not only that, “Bees and other pollinators helped to promote the rapid spread of flowering plants, leading to the loss of vegetarian dinosaurs’ traditional food sources [vegetables]. As the plant-eating dinosaurs declined, so would their predators.”
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