Scientists create chickens with dinosaur legs, because why not

By Lulu Chang 2 hours ago

Oh how the mighty dinosaurs have fallen. It’s a bit sad that the descendants of the magnificent creatures who once ruled the Earth have stubby wings and are the most commonly consumed meat in America (yes, I’m talking about the chicken). Such is the circle of life. And now, in an attempt to restore a bit of the glory of dinosaurs (or just create a truly bizarre looking animal), scientists have genetically modified chickens to give them dinosaur legs. Because science.
Interestingly enough, because of the close genetic relationship the modern day chicken shares with the prehistoric giant, the researchers involved with the wacky task simply had to silence a gene that chickens typically express. No gene insertion or further manipulation — just a (highly complex) flip of a switch.
The precise gene suppressed by the Chilean scientists, headed by Joâo Botelho
At Universidad de Chile is one called the Indian Hedgehog. This gene is crucial to the development of chicken’s bones, and when turned off, apparently allows the birds to develop a bone structure that looks just like the lower leg of a raptor. Chicken on top, dinosaur on the bottom.
Related: Just For the Tech of It: Martian crops and dinosaur chickens
This is by no means the first time that Botelho or other scientists have engineered a bird to go back to its more magnificent origins. Botelho also managed to undo the backward-facing perching toe common in birds to produce a front-facing toe — much like what dinosaurs had. And at Yale, a chicken was given a dinosaur-esque snout when its gene expression was altered at the embryo stage.
This sort of work is taking place across the country, and indeed, across the world, says Jack Horner, a famous paleontologist whose expertise was consulted in each and every one of the Jurassic Park films. At his lab at Montana State University, scientists are working to “ genetically alter a chicken egg to produce a more prehistoric version of the animal, complete with velociraptor-shaped head, arms, clawed hands and long tail,” the Post Register reports. But don’t worry, researchers say that we won’t be plunged into a real life version of the movies anytime soon.
“The experiments are focused on single traits, to test specific hypotheses,” says Alexander Vargas, who heds the lab in which Botelho works. “Not only do we know a great deal about bird development, but also about the dinosaur-bird transition, which is well-documented by the fossil record. This leads naturally to hypotheses on the evolution of development, that can be explored in the lab.”
Just call it scientific curiosity, and enjoy the strange but wonderful results that have come out of it … thus far.

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Oh how the mighty dinosaurs have fallen. It’s a bit sad that the descendants of the magnificent creatures who once ruled the Earth have stubby wings and are the most commonly consumed meat in America (yes, I’m talking about the chicken). Such is the circle of life. And now, in an attempt to restore a bit of the glory of dinosaurs (or just create a truly bizarre looking animal), scientists have genetically modified chickens to give them dinosaur legs. Because science.
Interestingly enough, because of the close genetic relationship the modern day chicken shares with the prehistoric giant, the researchers involved with the wacky task simply had to silence a gene that chickens typically express. No gene insertion or further manipulation — just a (highly complex) flip of a switch.
The precise gene suppressed by the Chilean scientists, headed by Joâo Botelho
At Universidad de Chile is one called the Indian Hedgehog. This gene is crucial to the development of chicken’s bones, and when turned off, apparently allows the birds to develop a bone structure that looks just like the lower leg of a raptor. Chicken on top, dinosaur on the bottom.
Related: Just For the Tech of It: Martian crops and dinosaur chickens
This is by no means the first time that Botelho or other scientists have engineered a bird to go back to its more magnificent origins. Botelho also managed to undo the backward-facing perching toe common in birds to produce a front-facing toe — much like what dinosaurs had. And at Yale, a chicken was given a dinosaur-esque snout when its gene expression was altered at the embryo stage.
This sort of work is taking place across the country, and indeed, across the world, says Jack Horner, a famous paleontologist whose expertise was consulted in each and every one of the Jurassic Park films. At his lab at Montana State University, scientists are working to “ genetically alter a chicken egg to produce a more prehistoric version of the animal, complete with velociraptor-shaped head, arms, clawed hands and long tail,” the Post Register reports. But don’t worry, researchers say that we won’t be plunged into a real life version of the movies anytime soon.
“The experiments are focused on single traits, to test specific hypotheses,” says Alexander Vargas, who heds the lab in which Botelho works. “Not only do we know a great deal about bird development, but also about the dinosaur-bird transition, which is well-documented by the fossil record. This leads naturally to hypotheses on the evolution of development, that can be explored in the lab.”

Just call it scientific curiosity, and enjoy the strange but wonderful results that have come out of it … thus far.

Forgotten fossil reveals growth potential of carnivorous dinosaurs

"Our study shows how museums still play an important role in preserving specimens of primary scientific value," said study co-author Andrea Cau. By Brooks Hays   |   Feb. 29, 2016 at 10:32 AM

A rendering offers an idea of how large abelisaurs were. Photo by ICL

LONDON, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- After re-examining a fossilized femur bone belonging to an abelisaur specimen, researchers can say with more certainty how large these fearsome predators could become.
Based on their analysis, researchers at Imperial College London believe the femur belonged to an abelisaur weighing nearly two metric tons and stretching nine meters, or almost 30 feet. Those dimensions make it one of the largest abelisaurs ever found.
The new research was detailed in the journal PeerJ.
"Smaller abelisaur fossils have been previously found by paleontologists, but this find shows how truly huge these flesh eating predators had become," researcher Alessandro Chiarenza, study co-auhtor, said in a press release. "Their appearance may have looked a bit odd as they were probably covered in feathers with tiny, useless forelimbs, but make no mistake they were fearsome killers in their time."
Abelisauridae dinosaurs made up for their tiny forelimbs and odd appearance with massive hindquarters and deadly sharp teeth. They thrived in what is now northern Africa some 95 million years ago, though abelisaur fossils have been dated as far back as 170 million years ago and as recently as 66 million years ago.
The femur was originally found in a Moroccan deposit known as Kem Kem Beds -- famous for its abundance of predatory dino bones. The site has confounded researchers who believe it would have been impossible for so many carnivorous dinosaurs to coexist in such tight quarters.
New analysis suggests the sometimes violent geologic conditions that created Kem Kem Beds may have also mixed up the strata and chronology of the fossil record.
Other sites suggest abelisaur were inland hunters, somewhat separated from their closest cousins, who preferred to hunt fish near lakes and rivers.
"This fossil find, along with the accumulated wealth of previous studies, is helping to solve the question of whether abelisaurs may have co-existed with a range of other predators in the same region," Chiarenza explained. "Rather than sharing the same environment, which the jumbled up fossil records may be leading us to believe, we think these creatures probably lived far away from one another in different types of environments."
The fossil was not recently unearthed, but had been sitting in a museum drawer for several decades -- further proof that closeted collections hide nearly as many secrets as untouched earth.
"While palaeontologists usually venture to remote and inaccessible locations, like the deserts of Mongolia or the Badlands of Montana," added Andrea Cau, study co-author and researcher at the University of Bologna, "our study shows how museums still play an important role in preserving specimens of primary scientific value, in which sometimes the most unexpected surprises can be discovered."

Scientists suggest a new, earth-shaking twist on the demise of the dinosaurs

By Joel Achenbach October 19

 

 

An illustration of the Chicxulub impact on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, seen from 100 kilometers (km) altitude. (D. van Ravenswaay/Photo Researchers, Inc)

New research suggests that the asteroid or comet that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago rocked the planet so violently that it accelerated a massive volcanic eruption in India, a double catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs and 70 percent of the Earth's species.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, puts a twist on the consensus explanation of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Scientists have long been confident that a mountain-sized object crashed into the planet, leaving traces even today of a vast crater at the tip of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
[Don’t worry. Matt Damon won’t get stuck on Mars. NASA can’t get him there.]
They’ve also known that massive volcanism in India was happening around the same time, spreading lava across a huge region known as the Deccan Traps. The coincidence of those two events initially hinted at causality, but subsequent dating of the Deccan Traps formations indicated that the flood of basaltic lava began long before the cataclysmic impact.

With the new data, causality's once again in play. The asteroid or comet didn’t cause the initial eruption, but it could have intensified it, according to the paper.
The Chicxulub impact – named after a town in the Yucatan – created earthquakes of magnitude 11 in the vicinity of the crater, the authors say. Magnitude 9 earthquakes would have been felt around the planet, they say.
[A ‘lost world’ of dinosaurs thrived in the snowy dark of Alaska]
The seismic energy made the planet's crust more permeable. Molten rock deep in the interior began flowing through fractures. As that magma expanded, gasses in the solution began forming bubbles. As with a shaken soda bottle, the results were likely explosive.
“Once that’s initiated, it becomes a kind of runaway process,” said Paul Renne, a University of California, Berkeley geologist and lead author of the new paper.

First ever evidence of a swimming, shark-eating dinosaur

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/

When it wasn't putting T. rex to shame, the dinosaur Spinosaurus spent its time swimming -- and chowing down on sharks.
Until now, scientists didn't have any proof that there were swimming dinosaurs. There were some marine reptiles prowling the seas, to be sure, but paleontologists couldn't find fossils that put dinosaurs in the water.
New fossil evidence published Thursday in Science changes that, and the  Spinosaurus aegyptiacus is breaking records left and right. It's now the largest predatory dinosaur to have ever roamed the planet — nearly 10 feet longer than the largest T. rex specimen — although the carnivore was still dwarfed by some of its plant-eating contemporaries. But more importantly, Spinosaurus has the distinction of providing our first ever evidence for a semi-aquatic dinosaur.

Spinosaurus was discovered in the Sahara more than a century ago by German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach, but all of his fossils were destroyed during World War II.
When a partial skeleton was uncovered in the Moroccan Sahara -- in a place once home to a massive system of rivers full of all sorts of sharks and other predators  -- scientists had a new clue that there was something fishy about the massive dino.
In addition to revealing a record-breaking length, digital modeling of the skeleton suggested a whole fleet of aquatic adaptations. Tiny nostrils, placed far back on the middle of the dinosaur's skull, presumably allowed it to breathe as it swam at the surface. It also had openings at the end of its snout that are reminiscent of ones in crocodiles and alligators. In the modern animals, these openings house receptors that let them sense movement in the water.

Paleontologists Nizar Ibrahim, left, and David Martill examine
 a spine fragment of Spinosaurus found in southeastern Morocco.
 (Photo by Cristiano Dal Sasso )
 

Huge, slanted, interlocking teeth seem perfectly shaped to catch fish, and hook-like claws would have been ideal for catching hold of slippery prey under the water. Big, flat feet (perhaps even webbed) would have been well-suited to paddling water or stomping through mud, and some unusually dense limb bones (more like those seen in penguins than those found in other dinosaurs, the researchers report) would have allowed it to keep itself under the water, instead of floating.
The dinosaur's skeletal shape indicates that it would have been a strange sight to us on land. The Spinosaurus's center of gravity was pushed forward by its long neck, so it was almost certainly impossible for it to walk on two legs. In fact, the Spinosaurus's legs and pelvis are quite like those seen in early whales -- much better for paddling than for walking. Like whales, these dinosaurs probably evolved from land-dwelling ancestors to become semi-aquatic.

Skull reconstruction of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus showing discovered
 bones in blue. (Image by Davide Bonadonna, Ibrahim et al., Science/AAAS)
 

Scientists aren't quite sure how Spinosaurus moved when it left the water -- which it must have done, at the very least, to lay and nest eggs. Spinosaurus didn't have the kind of limbs that scientists would expect in a four-legged animal, but it also couldn't have balanced on its hind legs for very long.
"I think that we have to face the fact that the Jurassic Park folks have to go back to the drawing board on Spinosaurus," co-author and University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno said in a teleconference held by Science on Wednesday. "It was not a balancing, two-legged animal on land. It would have been something very peculiar."
This isn't to say that Spinosaurus wouldn't have been an impressive sight on land. "It would have been a fearsome animal. There's no question about it, you would not want to meet this animal on land," Sereno said. "But it was not gallivanting across the landscape."
While paleontologists continue to puzzle over how the Spinosaurus managed to walk, you can visit a life-size skeletal replica of the creature at the National Geographic Museum in Washington. The exhibit will run Sept. 12th through April 12.

Were dinosaurs warm or cold blooded? Ancient eggshells could reveal the truth.

https://img.washingtonpost.com

By Rachel Feltman October 13

An artist’s rendering of oviraptorid theropods. (Doyle Trankina and Gerald Grellet-Tinner)

Were dinosaurs warm or cold blooded? New data suggests that the answer might be a simple "yes".
Back in the day, paleontologists assumed that dinosaurs were all lizard-like, and had the slow metabolisms to match — making them cold blooded, like alligators. These kinds of animals, more formally known as ectotherms, have to get most of their body heat from their environment. Endotherms, like humans and other mammals, are capable of producing most of the heat they need internally.
[Fossils might reveal the colors of ancient critters]
Now we know that many dinosaurs were actually bird ancestors. Birds are endothermic, and have super fast metabolisms.
So did some dinosaurs have bird-like metabolisms, and the hot blood to match? A study published Tuesday in Nature Communications claims to have found the answer in fossilized eggshells.
The basic findings line up with what most recent research in the area has concluded: Dinosaur metabolisms were all over the place.
"It's important to realize that there's actually a whole sliding scale of physiology," even in the modern animal kingdom, study author Robert Eagle of the University of California told The Post. Birds have metabolic rates that put humans to shame, he explained, making them arguably more "warm blooded" than we are. And then you have critters like sloths, that are on the slowest, coolest end of the warm blooded spectrum. "So the real question is where dinosaurs fell on that spectrum," he said.
[A crummy dinosaur fossil turns out to hold 75 million-year-old blood and proteins]
That's where Eagle's work comes in. He and his colleagues analyzed the chemical makeup of ancient eggshells, using a technique previously perfected on teeth to estimate the temperature of the body they formed in. By measuring the abundance of chemical bonds between two rare, heavy isotopes (carbon-13 and oxygen-18) in calcium carbonate minerals, scientists can estimate body temperature. A mineral that forms at colder temperatures will have more of these bonds than the same mineral formed at a higher temperature. In the case of an egg, scientists can use this ratio to estimate the temperature of the mother's body when she formed it. 

A large clutch of Titanosaur eggs. (Luis Chiappe)

After showing that this measurement worked in eggs from modern animals, Eagle and his colleagues tested fossilized eggs. Many showed signs of decay that would alter any conclusions about temperature, but they were able to analyze two species successfully — and found signs of a range of metabolic rates.
One was a long-necked titanosaur sauropod, and it indicated a maternal body temperature of about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, comparable to large mammals today. Another species — a T. rex-like oviraptorid — indicated a cooler 90-degree body temperature, which is lower than most modern mammals.
But chances are that both of them were at least somewhat endothermic, Eagle explained. Analysis of the soil around the oviraptorid eggs indicates that the air temperature may have been lower than their body temperature.
"We can't take just body temperature and jump to the conclusion that they weren't cold blooded," Eagle said, "but combined with other data, it's consistent with them having some kind of intermediary metabolism. This suggests that maybe they were warm blooded, but hadn't developed the high level of temperature regulation seen in mammals and birds today. They were kind of part way to evolving endothermy."
Since oviraptorids like this one were close relatives to the earliest birds, Eagle hopes that studying the evolutionary lineage more closely will reveal when and how metabolisms sped up so drastically.
"There's just a massive spectrum of different questions we can ask now," he said.

Scientists just found soft tissue inside a dinosaur fossil. Here's why that's so exciting.

http://www.vox.com/

Updated by Joseph Stromberg on June 9, 2015, 11:00 a.m. ET

A theropod claw fossil, in which microscopic structures resembling red blood cells were found. (Laurent Mekul)

 

Dinosaur fossils, it was long thought, are simple objects. The fossilization process leaves the overall shape of a dinosaur's bones intact, but all the microscopic structures inside them — the blood cells, connective fibers, and other sorts of soft tissue — inevitably decay over time.
But that view is changing — and it's possible that many ancient fossils may preserve more detail than meets the eye. The sort of biological tissue now being found in some fossils could tell us about dinosaur anatomy, behavior, and evolution in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago.

(Sergio Bertazzo)

The photo above, from a new study published today in Nature Communications and led by Sergio Bertazzo of Imperial College London, shows an extremely zoomed-in view of a 75-million-year-old theropod claw, taken from the London Natural History Museum's collection. When researchers scraped tiny pieces off the fossil and looked at them under an electron microscope, they found tiny structures that look a lot like collagen fibers present in our own ligaments, tendons, and bones.

Related This paleontologist just snuck a marriage proposal into his paper on a new dinosaur
How do you smuggle a dinosaur? And 7 other questions about the fossil black market

In other dinosaur fossils, the researchers found features that resemble red blood cells. Tests showed that they have a similar chemical composition to the blood of an emu (a bird thought to be a relatively close relative to dinosaurs).

  (Bertazzo et. al. 2015)

The idea that dinosaur fossils might harbor soft tissue first surfaced about a decade ago, when paleontologist Mary Schweitzer found evidence of blood cells preserved inside T. rex fossils.
But what's so exciting about this new study is that the fossils used, unlike Schweitzer's, aren't particularly well-preserved. Susannah Maidment, one of the paleontologists who worked on the paper, called them "crap" specimens. If they have preserved soft tissue inside them, it could be a sign that thousands of other fossils in museum collections do too.

How paleontologists found blood inside dinosaur fossils

(ScottRobertAnselmo)

For hundreds of years, most paleontologists never considered that their fossils might preserve these sorts of microscopic soft-tissue features. It was assumed that the proteins and other molecules they're made of would deteriorate in just a few million years.
What's more, looking inside them to confirm this would require that people damage the fossil, either by breaking it open or by dissolving the hard, mineralized outside, as Schweitzer did with her T. rex. "No right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens," paleontologist Thomas Holtz told Smithsonian for a 2006 story on Schweitzer's discovery. "We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid."

Soft tissue extracted from a T. rex fossil by Schweitzer appeared to contain blood cells. (Schweitzer et al., 2005/Science)

Schweitzer did so after a veterinarian at a conference happened to see microscope slides of T. rex bone slices and observed that there were red blood cells inside it. But her claim remained controversial among paleontologists — even after her 2006 paper, which presented more thorough testing.
More recent chemical analysis has provided further evidence that the
T. rex bones do indeed contain blood cells, and Schweitzer has since found soft tissue preserved inside an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur. It's still unclear exactly how this soft tissue is able to survive, but some hypothesize that iron molecules might bind to proteins in the tissue, making it more stable.
This newest paper, conducted with weathered, run-of-the-mill fossils rather than pristine ones, suggests that this process might be the rule, not the exception. If so, these findings could be the first of many to come.

Dinosaur blood and proteins could tell us about their behavior and evolution

(Vaderxl/Dinopedia)

You can only learn so much about an organism from its bones. As much as we've discovered from the hundreds of thousands of dinosaur fossils excavated around the world, we're still debating whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded and how many of them had feathers.
Peering inside these dinosaurs' bones — to look at their blood cells, connective tissue, and other microscopic features — could dramatically improve our understanding of their biology as a whole. The structure of their blood cells, for instance, could hint at their behavior and physiology in ways that their bones simply can't.
The tissue might help scientists better understand evolutionary relationships between species
The new information might also help scientists better understand evolutionary relationships between species. In the study, researchers found that the proteins inside the collagen-like fibers are well-preserved, with the specific sequence of amino acids that they're built from largely intact. Amino acid sequences in proteins gradually evolve over time and vary from species to species, somewhat like DNA — so analyzing them in dinosaurs could lead to better knowledge about the evolutionary relationships between them and other species, like birds.
But there's one thing we can't do with this soft tissue: extract dinosaur DNA and make Jurassic Park a reality. Compared with collagen fibers and red blood cells, DNA is much, much smaller and more fragile.
Perhaps DNA could also be more readily preserved than thought. But scientists currently estimate that it has a half-life of just 521 years, and dinosaurs largely died off 65 million years ago.