Posted on 02/11/2017 9:17:58 PM PST by nickcarraway
Several complete skeletons hint at sudden, mass extinction
Researchers from the Whiteside Museum of Natural History in Seymour are unraveling an ancient mystery.
"This is life," said Coleton Caldwell, assistant director of the museum. "The first time life is living on land, solely on land, and it's still trying to figure things out, you know? What works, what doesn't work? So it's just really, really, really unique."
Working southwest of Wichita Falls, near the shore of Lake Kemp in Baylor County, the researchers have uncovered the skeletal remains of seven dimetrodons.
The mammal-like finback reptiles roamed parts of North Texas 60 million years before dinosaurs arrived.
Four of the skeletons are nearly complete, and all of them were found clustered together around what was then a watering hole.
The evidence suggests not all of them are from the same species.
"It's really unique how there's so many animals just in this one spot," said Caldwell. "And then the mystery of why they're all here, alive together."
"It's just all carnivores, which is really, really unique because it shouldn't work that way," said Caldwell.
"Something catastrophic enough happened to kill all these animals at once," said Museum Director Chris Flis. "And it happened in an area where there's no more life around to actually strip it of flesh and meat and bone, so something happened, something so major that nobody had the time, had time enough to come back and clean up the mess."
"This is probably something as simple as a slight change in chemicals or oxygen or CO2 level," said Flis. "So studying how these guys died can tell you what to look out for now."
Over the last several years, the team has accumulated a large collection of specimens from nearby dig sites in the vast Craddock Bone Bed.
"We've seen thousands and thousands of bones," said Flis. "So we're changing the way dimetrodon looks."
"It doesn't have a dinosaur-shaped nose," said Flis. "He's got a square nose, very similar to mammals, and the funny thing is he's got buck teeth. So the two giant fangs that stick out of the front shows that his teeth are really buck teeth that are good for puncturing very quickly."
"We're seeing a glimpse of life before the dinosaurs, which is very important because we're seeing the beginnings of where mammals come from," said Flis.
The most complete dimetrodon skeleton currently on display is at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
OK, who caused the earth to change...? Did scientists find any very very old SUVs around?
Who can forget ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1940)! Victor Mature and Carol Landis.
Side by side photos of Landis(1940) and Raquel Welch(1966) causes primitive urges that at my age that I can’t remember why!
The dinosaur lizards were also nice.
He also played in THE THIRD MAN TV series in which Harry Lime was (gasp) a good guy! The sponsor was a beer company.
A neat thing about that one is that it left a small layer of iridium in the geological strata all over the world, which is a strong indication that it came from a meteor, iridium being rare on our planet.
ETL:
From Wikipedia... Terrestrial life in the Permian included diverse plants, fungi, arthropods, and various types of tetrapods. The period saw a massive desert covering the interior of Pangaea. The warm zone spread in the northern hemisphere, where extensive dry desert appeared.[18] The rocks formed at that time were stained red by iron oxides, the result of intense heating by the sun of a surface devoid of vegetation cover. A number of older types of plants and animals died out or became marginal elements. The Permian began with the Carboniferous flora still flourishing. About the middle of the Permian a major transition in vegetation began. The swamp-loving lycopod trees of the Carboniferous, such as Lepidodendron and Sigillaria, were progressively replaced in the continental interior by the more advanced seed ferns and early conifers. At the close of the Permian, lycopod and equisete swamps reminiscent of Carboniferous flora survived only on a series of equatorial islands in the Paleotethys Sea that later would become South China.[19] The Permian saw the radiation of many important conifer groups, including the ancestors of many present-day families. Rich forests were present in many areas, with a diverse mix of plant groups. The southern continent saw extensive seed fern forests of the Glossopteris flora. Oxygen levels were probably high there. The ginkgos and cycads also appeared during this period.
Yeah, like I said: No grasses (or other angiosperms).
Your point?
Based on current evidence, some propose that the ancestors of the angiosperms diverged from an unknown group of gymnosperms in the Triassic period (245–202 million years ago).
-Wikipedia
That was the period following the Permian.
Regards,
That's called stop-motion animation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion
Regards,
I was just providing some additional info on the vegetation of the period. Nothing to get touchy about. :)
That’s called stop-motion animation.
____________________________
"Go motion is a variation of stop motion animation which incorporates motion blur into each frame involving motion.[1]
It was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Phil Tippett.
Stop motion animation can create a disorienting, and distinctive staccato effect, because the animated object is perfectly sharp in every frame, since each frame of the animation was actually shot when the object was perfectly still.
Real moving objects in similar scenes of the same movie will have motion blur, because they moved while the shutter of the camera was open.
Filmmakers use a variety of techniques to simulate motion blur, such as moving the model slightly during the exposure of each film frame or using a petroleum smeared glass plate in front of the camera lens to blur the moving areas."
Thanks for taking it in stride!
Regards,
Are you saying you're beyond being educated? You know everything about what went on during every geologic time period?
Learned something new! Thanks!
Well, never claimed to be an expert on animation techniques - just a hobby paleontologist.
Regards,
No problem. I too am sort of an amateur paleontologist, although I don’t get around to collecting much these days. As a geology major in the 80s I worked as a part-time assistant to an invertebrate paleontologist, an expert on ancient sponges.
At least gas was cheap back then. Oh, wait...
Perhaps it was some naturally occurring toxin that contaminated the water, poisoning all of them.
Roger that.
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