Stories tagged prehistoric life
Giant Teratorn (Argentavis magnificens): Image by Stanton F. Fink. Courtesy Wikipedia Creative Commons.A large prehistoric bird living in Argentina six million years ago may have soared like an eagle, but probably took off more like a clumsy albatross.
Scientists think that Argentavis magnificens, a gigantic 155 pound bird whose 23 foot wingspan rivaled that of a small plane had all the equipment necessary to get the most from downdrafts and thermals, but would have struggled to get airborne by just flapping its wings.
Instead, the bird, which is sometimes referred to as the Giant Teratorn, needed get a running start off a sloping hillside to become airborne, according to the lead researcher Professor Sankar Chatterjee, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
"Like an albatross or a hanglider, Argentavis needed a little sloping surface; and he needed to run a bit, and headwind would have helped. Using this trick he could take-off but after that he didn't need to do much flapping of the wings," Professor Chatterjee said.
Once in the air, Argentavis’s giant wingspan would have been perfect for getting the most out of updrafts and thermals rising up from the sloping foothills of the Andes during the late Miocene Epoch.
"Because the fossils of Argentavis are found from the foothills of the Andes to the pampas, it is likely that it used primarily slope-soaring over the windward slopes of the Andes and thermal-soaring over the open pampas,” Chatterjee added.
Professor Chatterjee and his colleagues gathered information from the creature’s fossil remains and fed them into a computer to analyze its flying capabilities. Results of the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), showed the bird’s wing structure probably didn’t have the muscle-power to lift it straight off the ground. Instead, it would have needed to launch itself either from a perch or with a running start down a sloping hillside.
"But once it was on a thermal, it could easily rise up a mile or two without any flapping of its wings - a free ride, just circling. Then at the top, the bird could simply glide to the next thermal and in this way it could certainly travel 200 miles a day,” Chatterjee said.
From such a high vantage point, and along with its huge beak and claws, Argentavis would have been a formidable predator swooping down on rodents and other unsuspecting prey.
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Oily, gunky, messy tar pits give up some of their many fossils.: Tar pit at Rancho La Brea Pits, source of thousands of prehistoric animal fossils. Photo by David E. Crawley, courtesy of the University of California-Riverside.New strains of bacteria found living in the 28,000 year-old Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles could prove useful in our modern world.
Discovered in the oil-drenched soil at one of the world’s greatest burial sites of prehistoric ice age animals and plants, the bacteria and enzymes within them are showing interesting properties that could be used in the medical and biofuel industries, not to mention cleaning up oil and other hydrocarbon spills.
Pit 91 at the La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles, CA: Photo by David E. Crawley, courtesy the University of California-Riverside.Two scientists at the University of California-Riverside (UCR) noticed bubbles of methane rising out of the pits of oily asphalt at the site in downtown Los Angeles, and determined the source of the gas to be bacteria living comfortably on and in the gooey mess. The odd discovery found at Pit 91 initiated a study by Jong-Shik Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Sciences.
“We were surprised to find these bacteria because asphalt is an extreme and hostile environment for life to survive,” Kim said. “It’s clear, however, that these living organisms can survive in heavy oil mixtures containing many highly toxic chemicals. Moreover, these bacteria survive with no water and little or no oxygen.”
The bacteria are probably descendents of soil microorganisms that were trapped in the asphalt, according to Kim’s co-author and advisor David E. Crowley, a professor of environmental microbiology at UCR.
“Some may also have been carried to the surface in the heavy oil that seeped upwards from deep underground oil reservoirs,” Crowley added.
Kim and Crowley collected DNA from the microbes by first freezing globs of asphalt with liquid nitrogen (another great use of cryogenics), then grounding the mixture into a powder from which they extracted the DNA.
“Previously, some bacteria had been cultured from the asphalt, but no one had been able to extract DNA from the asphalt to study the entire microbial community,” Kim said.
Most of the more than 200 species of microorganisms identified by the researchers are being classified as new families, whose closest living relatives are able to survive in extreme environments including radioactive ones.
The results of their studies were published online in the April 6 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology , and a display about the discovery is currently at the La Brea Tar Pits' Page Museum in Los Angeles.
A father-and-son team have discovered the first complete skull of a plesiosaur ever found in Montana.
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