 | The tracks, described in a report published Wednesday by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the first appearance of this dinosaur lineage to about 250 million years ago. “They are the oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage of any type anywhere in the world,” said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University and lead author of the journal article. |
 | As he ventured into the forests of Chocó, a mountainous region in western Colombia, Conservation International (CI) Amphibian Conservation Officer Robin Moore wasn’t feeling very optimistic. As part of CI’s Search for the Lost Frogs, his small team of herpetologists was on the hunt for four species of amphibians that hadn’t been seen in at least a decade. But after spending the previous two days and nights sifting through leaf litter on steep mountain slopes in nearby Sonsón, not only had the researchers not seen any traces of these species – they had found almost no animal life at all. |
Scientific knowledge of this species is based entirely on the 1914 discovery of two individuals in a creek north of the western Colombian village of Mesopotamia. Like other species in its genus, it is believed to produce eggs that hatch directly into small toads (forgoing the tadpole stage). The species has not been seen since its discovery, and its original habitat is unprotected and under intense pressure from human activities. |  |
ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2010) — It might seem obvious that a dinosaur’s leg bone connects to the hip bone, but what came between the bones has been less obvious. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri and Ohio University have found that dinosaurs had thick layers of cartilage in their joints, which means they may have been considerably taller than previously thought. The study is being published this week in the journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science). «Our study of the limbs of modern-day relatives of dinosaurs shows that dinosaurs were significantly taller than original estimates,» said Casey Holliday, lead author of the study and an anatomy professor in the MU School of Medicine. «The ends of many dinosaurs’ long bones, which include leg bones such as the femur or tibia, are rounded and rough and lack major articulating structures like condyles, which are bony projections. This indicated that very thick cartilages formed these structures, and therefore the joints themselves, and would have added significant height to certain dinosaurs. This study offers new data into how and why reptiles, and mammals, such as humans, build their joints with such different amounts of bone and cartilage.» |  |
